Photographs sprinkled throughout are the most riveting part of a flat memoir.
A depiction of life after the Iranian Revolution will invite inevitable—and unfavorable—comparison with Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.
The Revolution tore apart the Latifi clan, as first-time author Latifi recounts in this family saga. Her father is arrested on trumped-up murder charges, tried before a puppet court, and executed. Latifi’s courageous and cunning mother sends her two daughters—ten and eleven—to Austria for schooling and for safety, and they eventually settle in the US. The author learns English from television, studies hard, and becomes an attorney. After years apart, Mother and all the Latifi siblings are reunited in America, and the tale concludes with our heroine’s first, emotionally grueling trip back to Iran. Despite the thrilling backdrop, though—the tumultuous Iranian politics, international education, high-pitched emotions—the story is colorless and plodding. Experiences that might have been entrancing in the hands of another writer tend to the prosaic: “Day-to-day life in Iran was becoming impossible”; “Before long, I began to feel more optimistic about the future”; “I was . . . devastated by the break-up.” Occasionally, Latifi leavens such generalities with concrete, specific details—her first use of Nair, her discovery of library cards and of Jane Austen, her first visit to an American courtroom, the ugly plaid that seems ubiquitous in Virginia. For the most part, though, she breaks the cardinal show/don’t-tell rule, the result being an ultimately tedious read. In her summer law clerkship in Charleston, West Virginia, for example, Latifi felt so out of place that she quit, leaving in early July—and what a wonderful chapter this could have made, full of sights, sounds, and misunderstandings. But Latifi summarizes the entire affair with “I was hopelessly lonely in Charleston, and I found the place depressingly provincial.” Her tumultuous childhood is of interest, but it doesn’t make an on-again/off-again romance with a good-looking man (who remains two-dimensional) worth spending time with.
Photographs sprinkled throughout are the most riveting part of a flat memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074533-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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