Farsad combines throwaway laughs with some keeper insights. Readers may sense that she has a smarter, funnier book on the...
A memoir/essay collection from a self-described “hyphenated American…an Iranian-Muslim-female-honey-mustard-enthusiast” who is also a comedian, writer, filmmaker, and TED talker.
Such range and accomplishment suggest that Farsad might well have a rich and provocative book in her, but this scattershot debut isn’t it. Toward the end, Farsad describes her work as “social justice comedy,” though some of the most scathingly funny comedy today could fit that label without wearing it. Unlike plenty of books by stand-up comedians, this isn’t simply a series of bits or monologues transferred to the page. The author has some serious points to make about stereotypes and icons and about the many like her who are left in the margins amid “the binary discussion of race.” Her book takes its title from one of her TED talks, and it’s a title that would seem to suggest a black author—a symptom of the disease that afflicts the nation’s concept of diversity. Some of the most engaging sections are those that are closest to memoir, in which Farsad discusses growing up as a minority to other minorities, identifying with Mexicans because they were the closest match for the sole Iranian-American. “Just as I considered myself Mexican in high school,” she writes, “in college I began shifting my sights to being black.” The author came to realize that wherever she found herself fitting, she has also been marginalized by gender, by the assumption that a woman couldn’t be funny enough to be a comedian or smart enough to be a writer. Devoting herself to toppling such stereotypes, she finds strongest resistance to her work from those who, like her, are Muslim women. “My material isn’t racier than the average comic’s, not by a long shot,” she writes. “But to that Muslim minority, in the audience, it was shameful.”
Farsad combines throwaway laughs with some keeper insights. Readers may sense that she has a smarter, funnier book on the way later in her career.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-5822-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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