Alinejad’s account provides a timely glimpse behind the Iranian curtain.
Pointed memoir by an Iranian journalist who has been a longtime advocate of women’s rights in the Islamic republic.
Alinejad, who has largely lived in exile for years, was born in a village in northern Iran. “I couldn’t imagine a better place anywhere else in the world,” she writes of her hometown. Born two years before the ouster of the shah, the author never knew the relative freedoms women enjoyed in Iran before the revolution in a state so secular that a law was passed forbidding women from wearing the hijab. “If I was alive then,” she writes, “I’d have opposed it not because I believe in the hijab but because I believe in freedom of choice.” Such belief drew Alinejad away from her quiet home and into significant events, and she became a news reporter. “The road to expulsion is paved with scoops,” she writes. It’s the content of those scoops, along with the graft and corruption underlying a regime that is still made up of politicians, that will be of interest to readers, certainly much more than the mundane details of her life and rote observations such as, “I’d always wanted my life to be impactful.” Driven from her country, Alinejad became a vocal and highly visible critic of the Ahmadinejad regime—but more, of the entire theocracy, which put her at odds with other members of the opposition: “The reformists didn’t want to overthrow the whole regime. They just didn’t like Ahmadinejad.” Even more visibly, she went on to found a movement against the compulsory wearing of the hijab, which encountered its own difficulties when Western women and men who might have been allies were reluctant to criticize Iran for fear of being labeled as bigots. “I realized,” she writes, “I was fighting both Trump’s Islamophobia and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s misogynist policies.”
Alinejad’s account provides a timely glimpse behind the Iranian curtain.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-54891-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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