An admirable account that will be of special interest to those keeping their eyes on the Middle East.
Iranian jurist and attorney Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, recounts a life of commitment to human rights in the face of tyranny.
Ebadi (with Time Islamic affairs correspondent Moaveni) wasn’t well known outside Iran when she won the Nobel, but she was renowned within the country for fighting for women’s rights. Too, she had recently turned up evidence that the Islamic Republic had been murdering intellectual critics of the regime “in the name of God.” The roving hit squads, most of whose members “were low-ranking functionaries of the Ministry of Intelligence,” had knifed or strangled dozens of victims by 2000, when Ebadi discovered her name on the list, about the time she was briefly imprisoned as an object lesson in what happens to those who question the regime. It was not the first time Ebadi, born into an influential family that fell on hard times under the Shah’s rule, had been in trouble with the law. Appointed a judge at 23, she was removed from office when the mullahs came to power; she recounts a meeting with Fathollah Bani-Sadr, who would rise to prominence in the Islamist regime, and who “suggested” that she veil herself in deference to “our beloved Imam Khomeini, who has graced Iran with his return.” The suggestion did not take, though many of her colleagues adapted quickly to the new government, just as, she observes, they did when Mossadegh was assassinated and the Shah took control. Steadfast in her commitment to democratic reform, Ebadi closes by praising her daughter’s generation for defying the “morals police” and pressing for civil rights, and she declares that “the [Bush administration’s] threat of regime change by military force . . . endangers nearly all of the efforts democracy-minded Iranians have made in these recent years.”
An admirable account that will be of special interest to those keeping their eyes on the Middle East.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6470-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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