Affecting letters bearing witness to human rights abuses.
A collection of the author’s touching letters written over six months to her father, who was imprisoned in Tehran for expressing his political views.
In 2001, when Rafiee’s father, Hossein, a chemistry professor at the University of Tehran, was arrested for the first time by the Iranian Revolutionary Court agents and imprisoned, she gave him a cache of letters upon his release six months later. Her father was deeply moved by the letters, which he had not received in jail, and urged her to publish them. At the time, the author was a 17-year-old about to graduate high school and too shy to pursue the project. However, when Hossein was jailed again in 2015 on similar charges of membership in an illegal organization and “propagating falsehoods in order to agitate the public mind and government officials with the intent of conveying the State as inefficient,” she resolved to confront what she and her father considered a violation of human rights. Seized mysteriously at a meeting of a pro-democracy political coalition on March 11, 2001, the author’s “Baba” was whisked away into solitary confinement, perhaps in the notorious Evin Prison—though the family, consisting of the author, her brother, Mohammad, a university student, and her stalwart though ailing mother, were not apprised of his whereabouts. During the next few months, she and her mother besieged the court, along with other bereft wives, to demand access to their vanished husbands, finding strength in organization and activism. While her mother confronted the newly re-elected president, Mohammad Khatami, the author recognized her role as a historian, documenting what she saw and heard, and she sent a letter to the U.N. Commissioner of Human Rights. She also resolved to pursue a career as an activist doctor. Although her grades suffered and she was single-mindedly anxious about her father’s condition, Rafiee ultimately embraced her political education.
Affecting letters bearing witness to human rights abuses.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60801-161-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: UNO Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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