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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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