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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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