Readers keeping an eye on the contemporary Middle East will learn much from Fathi’s travels and observations.
Cautious but subtly optimistic account of Iran’s unfinished revolution by New York Times correspondent Fathi.
The author was still a child when, in 1979, an insurrection led by an uneasy alliance of leftists and Muslim fundamentalists forced the shah of Iran from his throne. As she notes, more than two-thirds of her compatriots were not even born when these transformative events occurred, and though the ayatollahs imposed an austere rule over the country, Iran’s young men and women have been “exposed to new ideas and opinions through technologies such as satellite television and the Internet.” In other words, Iran is not monolithic in its religious conservatism, nor in any other way; neither is it backward, though the suspicion that it is haunts Iranians: Backwardness, writes the author, “had embarrassing connotations of ignorance, poverty, and underdevelopment.” Crunching the numbers, it wouldn’t seem that the Iranians have much to worry about, for Fathi reckons that two-thirds of the country is also solidly middle-class, which would rival the statistics for the United States. The concept of backwardness, though, is a strong one, dating back many generations, and it has explanatory power for why Iran should so often make the news trying to assert itself in regional and even world events. Fathi’s combination of reportage and memoir is often effective, as when she writes of religion through the lens of an experience with a teacher who assured her that her prayers were “nullified” because her hood wasn’t arranged just so: “Her Islam was more about outward signs…to a point that was annoying.” Though, as the author notes, Iran has more than its share of dour by-the-book religionists, it is also refreshingly diverse and heterodox—if also in need of much change.
Readers keeping an eye on the contemporary Middle East will learn much from Fathi’s travels and observations.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0465069996
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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