Valuable human-interest stories that provide food for thought and hope for change regarding a troubled yet vibrant society.
A Tehran-born American journalist invites readers to reexamine what they think they know about Iran and its people.
Kangarlou, an accomplished international correspondent who has spent years reporting from the Middle East for CNN, NBC, and other outlets, is cleareyed about the goal of her debut book: Recognizing that many Westerners see Iran as an oppressive theocracy, she seeks to rectify this simplistic take on her home country. Her approach—a series of vignettes of individual Iranians set against a broader historical background—is disarming and mostly effective. Kangarlou confronts stereotypes about Iranians and how those stereotypes are often complicated by people’s private lives—e.g., the gay son of a general in the Revolutionary Guard; a reformist Shia Muslim cleric known as the “Blogger Ayatollah”; Iran’s first female race-car driver, who, despite hardships, chooses to remain in her country (“my entire family, failures, successes, struggles, wins, are all here”); and a transgender woman with childhood dreams of becoming a cleric. The author’s portraits reveal a country that is more intricate and tolerant than many readers comprehend. For example, Kangarlou shows how the government permits many freedoms to religious minorities like Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Furthermore, “Iran is the only Muslim country in the region that grants legal rights to transgender people.” In other ways, the stories confirm certain impressions of Iranian society, such as sweeping limits on the press or the fact that Iran’s gay community has been forced to live largely in secret for decades. Because Kangarlou doesn’t dig as deep into the nation’s brutal side, the book isn’t a comprehensive picture of “the real Iran.” However, it’s a readable narrative that sounds strong notes of compassion about a nation that is often misunderstood.
Valuable human-interest stories that provide food for thought and hope for change regarding a troubled yet vibrant society.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63246-205-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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