In a brave, disturbing book, Azizi exposes the nature of the Iranian regime and applauds the courage of its opponents.
According to this passionate book, Iranians want a liberated life in a free country.
Azizi, the author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions, is a writer and historian based in New York City who specializes in Middle East issues. He shows how in Iran, even the most basic rights are either nonexistent or severely curtailed, with women and ethnic minorities facing the most severe oppression. The author tracks through the history of the country since 1979, when the aging cleric Ayatollah Khomeini led a revolution to install a hard-line Islamic regime. His shadow still looms large over Iranian politics, in everything from the requirement that all women wear hajib to the militant gangs who roam the streets looking for transgressors. Azizi ably describes the tenures of subsequent leaders who have promised reforms, only to crack down when pressed; the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is perhaps the most ruthless and manipulative of all. With the media effectively under government control, it is difficult for any organized opposition to form. Nevertheless, protests and demonstrations occur regularly, and the regime responds with murderous force and arbitrary detention. Azizi chronicles his interviews with many of Iran’s dissidents and believes that pressure is building for real change. His optimism, however, might be misplaced. The government, while plagued by corruption and incompetence, still has considerable support, and it holds all the guns. Still, the author lays out the situation in a cleareyed manner, and readers will leave with a deeper understanding of Iran’s historical and current circumstances. “No matter what comes after Khamenei,” he writes, “Iran’s formidable mass movements will continue to fight for Women, Life, Freedom: the fullest democracy and social, economic, environmental and gender justice.”
In a brave, disturbing book, Azizi exposes the nature of the Iranian regime and applauds the courage of its opponents.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780861547111
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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