This harrowing memoir provides an illuminating glimpse into the security apparatus of one of the world’s most repressive countries.
The elections of 2009 led to the largest street protests in Iran since the fall of the Shah, and the establishment responded by arresting and torturing thousands of the participants. With the assistance of Molloy (co-author: Jantsen’s Gift, 2009, etc.), Newsweek correspondent Bahari details his incarceration at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison. Because both his father and sister spent years in Iranian prisons for their political activism, Bahari was better prepared for his ordeal than most people, but the reality was shocking even to him. He learned from his interrogator, a man he knew only as “Rosewater” due to his overpowering perfume, that the Islamic Republic believed he was an American spy and one of the chief instigators of the protests. The key piece of evidence against him was an interview he once gave to a correspondent from the Daily Show with John Stewart, who was dressed as a spy and who introduced him by saying, “He goes by the code name Pistachio.” Rosewater also presented him with the damning evidence of his membership in a Pauly Shore fan club on Facebook, and that he had traveled to New Jersey. Much of the book concerns the psychological impact of imprisonment and separation from loved ones, and Bahari draws upon the strength of his relatives to survive. While contemplating suicide, he imagined his father telling him, “You shouldn’t do their jobs for them. If they want to kill you, they can easily do it themselves.” Especially timely given recent events throughout the Middle East, this book is recommended for anyone wishing to better understand the workings of a police state.
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6946-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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