An important eyewitness account, and a worthy companion volume to Davar Ardalan’s My Name Is Iran (Jan. 2007).
Two harrowing, shame-filled years in Iran’s Evin prison.
When unrest erupted in the streets of Tehran during the late 1970s, the author, daughter of Russian-Iranian Christians, was hardly aware of politics. Then her friends began to disappear one by one, seized first by the shah’s police, then by Khomeini’s fanatical supporters. Schools were shut down in the fall of 1978; when they reopened in 1980, teachers had been replaced by inexperienced revolutionary guards who preached politics rather than academics. In 1982, 16-year-old Nemat had the temerity to challenge her calculus teacher, inadvertently prompting a walkout by other frustrated students that gained the attention of authorities. She was arrested, blindfolded and taken to Evin, where she was tortured and put in line for execution. At the 11th hour, one of her tormentors, Ali, persuaded the ayatollah to commute her sentence to life in prison. Her will was nearly broken by violence and despair, yet she managed to keep her sanity, bonding with other miserable women and even lending help whenever she could. Then Ali confessed that he’d fallen in love with her and forced Nemat to marry him by threatening to have her boyfriend Andre and his family arrested if she said no. Incredibly, she not only converted to Islam but tried to love Ali. Pregnant when he was assassinated in front of her, she lost the baby. She married Andre, and in 1990, they were able to leave Iran with their young son; they have lived in Toronto since 1991. Anguished that she survived when so many others perished, Nemat pays tribute to them by testifying about her ordeal in spare, moving prose devoid of self-pity.
An important eyewitness account, and a worthy companion volume to Davar Ardalan’s My Name Is Iran (Jan. 2007).Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-4165-3742-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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