An exotic, absorbing, rather odd life saga played out against the volatile politics of Iran. ``Dispossessed of her Persian heritage,'' Farmaian (b. 1921) fondly recalls her harem childhood as the 15th of 36 children, the third-born to her 16-year-old mother, who was the third of her father's eight wives. Here, the author idealizes her father for his ability to recollect his children's names on Friday inspections and for teaching them to be ``obedient'' and grateful, to value education and service, and ``never to accept a bribe.'' Discouraged—as a woman she had ``no value''—from pursuing her own education, Farmaian nonetheless went to America in 1943, where she acquired a master's in social work, an Indian husband who abandoned her, and a daughter who, to her great consternation, was an American citizen. Returning to Iran in 1954, she began, with the Shah's approval, her school of social work, all the while condemning the US government for supporting the Shah, whose corruption she especially denounces here with her own particular form of snobbery: the Shah, she says, made people rich ``whose fathers no one had ever heard of.'' But Farmaian objects equally to the Khomeini revolution, its excesses and injustices: her recounting of her arrest, her defiant response to her interrogators, and her escape is the best reading in the book. Throughout, many of Farmaian's attitudes no doubt will offend the ``American friends'' for whom, along with her grandchildren, she says she is writing, in order to warn them against ``well-meaning efforts to remake the world in their image.'' Rejecting Western democracy, the constitutional monarchy of the Shah, and the religious state of the Ayatollah, the author seems to prefer the landed aristocracy of her father. A seemingly naive but fascinating psychological document, then, with occasional lyric moments: ``My country is a kingdom of fire, a carpet of sand and stone.'' (Eight-page b&w photo insert- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-58697-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
