Navai offers sharply rendered portraits of the bleak situation but does not provide much reason why she, and others she...
A daring exposé of what really goes on under the noses of the morality police in this God-fearing city of 12 million.
Many of these portraits of mostly contemporary Tehranis struggling against their country’s obsession with vice, public morality and political correctness are composite sketches. As such, British-Iranian journalist Navai protects the real identities of her subjects, who are as engaging as characters of fiction and reveal, frankly, the charade that living under Sharia law has become since Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “Let’s get one thing straight: in order to live in Tehran you have to lie,” writes the author in the opening. “Morals don’t come into it: lying in Tehran is about survival.” A brainwashed young member of the Western-backed terrorist group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (“Warriors of the People”) returned to the city of his youth after 20 years in America in order to assassinate Tehran’s former police chief; his plan resulted in devastating failure. A serious schoolgirl was encouraged by her parents to marry her charming older cousin, even though everyone knew he was a lazy philanderer. A young political activist was stalked by the judge who convicted his parents to hang in 1988; 15 years later, the judge desperately sought forgiveness and helped warn the activist that the Ministry of Intelligence was watching him. A prostitute turned to the more lucrative business of making porn movies, which were so popular in the Islamic state that she was duly exposed, imprisoned and hanged. Alcohol-running gangsters, martyrs, women arrested in belly-dancing class at the health club, a 13-year-old sold by her parents to a man in his 60s: These make up a deeply class-riven society in which sex is a rebellion and traditional values are circumvented at all costs.
Navai offers sharply rendered portraits of the bleak situation but does not provide much reason why she, and others she portrays, would ever want to return to Tehran.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-519-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
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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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