An exceptional, emotionally blooded memoir of a young man's life in modern Iran—viewed from the perspective of his self- chosen exile. Milani (Social Sciences/Notre Dame College, Calif.), born to a well-off family in Tehran in 1948, was sent to the US at age 15 to be educated. He returned to a teaching job in 1975 only to be imprisoned under the shah's regime two years later. Milani departed for good in 1986, having suffered a broken marriage and physical symptoms of stress and depression that had everything to do with the country's climate of political ugliness. Any book chronicling those experiences would be interesting; that this one turns out to be a breathtaking example of the quiet, selfless gorgeousness of the memoirist's art is the reader's sheer good fortune. Milani offers classically ordered writing about character, place, and time. Contemporary Tehran is described as ``an overcrowded, densely polluted, dangerously stratified, economically hyped, architecturally schizoid, dust-ridden modern metropolis.'' The author's youth was ``contaminated with religion.'' Best are the descriptions of childhood—the psychologically complex parents behind the beards and veils; blackly comic musings about shortages of Ramadan pastries; circumcision at age 15 (``It's nothing,'' his friends tell him. ``They just cut off half your dool''). But the entire memoir is infused with the perversity, nightmarishness, and occasional strange sweetness of growing up amid religious rule and ritual. The book has a few flaws. Long excurses on Iranian politics veer off into abstractness, and the author seems unable to outgrow a certain coyness when writing about women (for whom, it must be said, he has an admirable regard). But this is a tale on whose every word readers will hang. Is exile—with its nuances of time, space, grief, loss, and the human comedy—the most reliable progenitor of literary beauty? This book would support that theory. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-934211-47-7
Page Count: 278
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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