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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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