A work as charming and elegant as the actress herself, conveying her remarkable career as a survivor of the Iranian debacle.
From the Iranian Revolution to Hollywood, with courage and style.
The first Iranian and Middle Eastern actor to be nominated for an Academy Award (House of Sand and Fog), Aghdashloo tells a plucky tale of fortune and tenacity, beginning in Tehran in the late 1960s as the firstborn of a well-off civil servant. Although the shah had modernized the country considerably, traditional values were still strictly adhered to—e.g., the interdiction on becoming an actress, as the author desperately desired from early on. While her father had decided she was going to become a doctor, the then-19-year-old author was waylaid by a dashing older suitor, Aydin Aghdashloo, a well-connected artist who truly swept her off her feet. He also assured her that, as his wife, she could pursue her dream. She did, instantly procuring a spot at the theater workshop that would provide her with some teeth-cutting roles over the next few years. Yet the political situation grew dodgy by the late 1970s, and the author writes that she had to choose between staying in a repressive atmosphere that censored the arts and leaving her husband, who had decided to stay in Iran. It was a heartrending decision, but the author does not adequately explain it, perhaps due to the confusion of the time. Aghdashloo installed herself in London, returned to school and completed her college degree by her early 30s, working largely at Browns boutique in Knightsbridge and selling her jewelry and car. She eventually found acting work that conveyed her to Hollywood. Though somewhat high-handedly edited, her work conveys a tremendous energy and love for her craft and adopted country.
A work as charming and elegant as the actress herself, conveying her remarkable career as a survivor of the Iranian debacle.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-200980-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
