A fine starting point for those interested in the history and future of Iran, but far from definitive.
This brief look at the history of Iran has an eye toward using the region’s diverse past as an argument for regime change.
Political unrest in the Middle East is deeply rooted in the region’s complex past, and its present and future are inexorably tied to events predating even the formation of Islam. This is especially true in Iran, a country that, despite its controversial role in the war on terror, is presented by ChamanAra (A Journey to the Truth, 2005, etc.) as a pluralistic society, both in its origins and as it exists today. However, according to the author, it is because of Iran’s vocal, ruling minority that the country stands at odds with its neighbors, so the dream of peace remains out of reach. The book’s solution is an optimistic though not implausible one, which suggests that regime change in Iran is possible without foreign military intervention. Instead, by utilizing the country’s moderate base (both at home and the millions of expatriate Iranians), religion and government could be separated in the country through the rejection of Sharia law, along with limited diplomatic pressure from the United States. Diplomacy in the region is, of course, not to be frivolously approached, so ChamanAra provides a useful “crash-course” in Iranian history, which looks at the conflicts that shaped the country and illustrates how they affected the Muslim faith, with emphasis on the differences between the Shia and Sunni and a focus on the hard-line offshoot, the Wahhabi. This history is exceedingly useful in understanding the book’s principle arguments; citation is poor, however, with most of the facts culled from Wikipedia, lending some doubt as to their validity. While it’s clear that ChamanAra has an impressive understanding and deep passion for Iran, the passion is outweighed by all the cold, dubious facts. The narrative occasionally slips into a reserved, almost detached tone, punctuated by obtuse metaphors and some intellectual condescension in its portrayal of Third World countries after World War II. In the end, the book’s revolutionary ideas aren’t adequately explored; instead, they’re lost in what amounts to a short history book.
A fine starting point for those interested in the history and future of Iran, but far from definitive.Pub Date: April 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1469168562
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.
A modern-day Phileas Fogg circumnavigates the globe in books.
Damrosch, chair of the department of comparative literature at Harvard and founder of its Institute for World Literature, mimics Jules Verne’s ambitious itinerary of world travel from east to west as he delves into 16 geographical groups of five books “that have responded to times of crises and deep memories of trauma,” navigating “our world’s turbulent water with the aid of literature’s map of imaginary times and places.” As he moves along, delving into plots, characters, and themes, and both prose and poetry, over centuries, he creates a vast, fascinating latticework of books within books. He begins in London, with “one of the most local of novels” and “one of the most worldly books ever written,” Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which depicts a city that “bears more than a passing reference to Conrad’s heart of darkness.” Paris and Krakow are followed by “Venice–Florence,” with the old (Marco Polo, Dante, and Boccaccio) and the modern, Italo Calvino’s “magical, unclassifiable” Invisible Cities. Just like Damrosch’s own book, Calvino’s work views “the modern world through multiple lenses of worlds elsewhere.” Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is “a vibrant hybrid that re-creates a vanished Ottoman past for present purposes,” while Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies “portrays life in a fully globalized Oman.” Traveling along at a brisk pace, Damrosch takes us to the Congo, Israel/Palestine, Calcutta and “Shanghai–Beijing,” before arriving in Tokyo, where he examines Japan’s “greatest, and strangest” writer, Yukio Mishima, and the “incommensurability of ancient and modern eras, Asian and European traditions, that fuels” his work. Brazil is home to one of the “most worldly of local writers,” Clarice Lispector, whose “remarkable short story collection,” Family Ties, the author admires. In Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine, Damrosch fondly revisits a book he enjoyed as a child. Other writers serving as stops on his international tour include Joyce, Atwood, Voltaire, Rushdie, and Soyinka.
This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-29988-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
With something to ponder on every page, a bracing exhortation to do right by the people of centuries to come.
Scottish ethicist and Oxford professor MacAskill urges that those alive today consider the lingering effects of their carbon-footprint–deepening actions.
“Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better,” writes the author in a combination of thought experiment and reader-friendly white paper. His future is “big,” extending millions of years out, which is perhaps touchingly optimistic given the long-standing habit of mammalian species to disappear after a million years or so. The bigness of that future is what has prompted MacAskill to propound “longtermism,” with its challenging guiding idea that we owe it to people we will never see and whom we may or may not have propagated (the choice for childlessness figures in the argument) to improve their chances of survival. The author identifies a daunting array of modern threats. One is climate change; another is the ever present threat of nuclear war, heightened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Optimistic again, MacAskill suggests that there are ways we can choose peace and avert the worst effects of climate change by “decarbonizing,” which he calls a “proof of concept for longtermism…against which other potential actions can be compared.” There are other, less obvious threats that worry the author. For example, what might happen if the artificial intelligence of the present is programmed in such a way that it promotes “bad-value lock-in” and thereby makes inevitable a perpetual fascist world government in the future? Throughout, MacAskill brings expansive ideas. He examines the process of history-shifting “value change” by considering changing attitudes toward human slavery. On a more personal scale, he advocates vegetarianism, and he observes that not having children may mean an absence of kids with good values who “can be change makers who help create a better future.”
With something to ponder on every page, a bracing exhortation to do right by the people of centuries to come.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1862-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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