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 Schools were shut down in the fall of 1978; when they reopened in 1980, teachers had been replaced by inexperienced revolutionary guards who preached politics rather than academics.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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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