A powerful and uplifting memoir of tragedy and healing.
A New York–based clinical psychologist tells the moving story of the life-changing trauma she and her family suffered as a result of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
For the first four years of her life, Andalibian grew up in the protected space of her family and the Rose Hotel, a luxury guesthouse her father ran for pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mashhad. Everything changed in late 1978 when her father became entangled in a web of religious and political intrigue involving a woman and her two teenage rapists. The new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini promised a fresh start to what everyone believed would be a more just society. Then Iranian courts charged—and later executed—Andalibian’s oldest brother, Abdollah, for a crime he didn’t commit. To protect the family, her parents told their remaining children that he had gone to America to study; yet the lie did nothing to stop the family from moving into a dark spiral of despair. In the difficult years that followed, the Andalibians moved away from their beloved Rose Hotel. Later, a health crisis forced the author’s mother to seek medical care in London and forced a long period of separation between the author and two brothers. Even after the family reunited and then immigrated a second time to Southern California, memories of their old life in Iran and of Abdollah’s “disappearance” continued to haunt them. Her parents, especially her devout Muslim father, were adrift in a Western society they could neither entirely accept nor understand, while alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce and undiagnosed mental illness plagued their children. Through a fierce love that was often tested beyond its limits, Andalibian helped her family understand the necessity of revealing long-held secrets and accepting each other’s foibles and vulnerabilities. Only then could they finally emerge, scarred but whole, “from its shadows.”
A powerful and uplifting memoir of tragedy and healing.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1479-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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