Elegantly soulful and uplifting.
The eloquent account of a Western poet’s encounters with the land, culture and people of Iran.
When Housden (Ten Poems to Change Your Life, 2007, etc.) was a young man living in London in the early 1970s, he fell profoundly and permanently in love with Iranian literature, music, art and architecture. His vision of and attachment to Iran were highly idealized, however, based on second-hand cultural experiences that were “never tested by reality.” In 2007, as he was casting about for his next writing project, he had a flash of intuition. He would undertake an exploration of “the other Iran,” the country behind the politics and sensationalist headlines. The guides along this journey would include Rumi, the Persian mystic poet he had held close to his heart since youth; outspoken artists, thinkers, politicians and spiritual leaders; and everyday men and women. In his travels across Iran, Housden discovered a vibrant country made all the livelier by its abundant internal contradictions. Though austere on the surface with its apparent adherence to the fundamentalist tenets of Islam, Iran was a place where anything—from alcohol, Western films, drugs and sex—could be “delivered like a pizza” and where nose jobs and “Elvis haircuts” were the most popular and pervasive forms of social rebellion. At the same time, it was also a place steeped in tradition and a magnificent history that had deeply impacted the cultural and religious development of the West. But most movingly of all for Housden, a self-proclaimed romantic, Iran was where “Beauty [was] one of the names for God.”
Elegantly soulful and uplifting.Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-58773-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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