A must.
Journalist Moaveni returns to her parents’ homeland as a reporter for Time magazine and finds life infinitely more complex than she’d imagined.
Growing up in southern California, Moaveni knew herself to be Iranian, with all the discomfort attached to being associated with the nation that authored the 1979 Hostage Crisis. (Most in her community chose to identify themselves as Persian.) She also knew herself to be American, especially whenever she visited her family in Tehran. In 2000, she returned there as an adult in order to find the “lost generation”—her own—that grew up in the shadow of the 1979 revolution. The author’s account of trying, on the one hand, to be a foreign reporter under a theocratic regime, and, on the other, a normal young woman with a career and family and her own apartment, is beautifully nuanced, complex, and illuminating. Moaveni is perfectly situated to report on normal Iranian life to an audience of Americans, since, as an insider, she can report on those things that foreigners would find most illuminating. The real characters she describes are far more complex than the usual sources would be, and her command of Farsi allows her experience to be direct and unmediated. When her grandfather quotes ancient Persian poetry, Moaveni gets it; when her maid disapproves of her single lifestyle, she hears it straight from the horse’s mouth; and when a cleric tries to get her home phone number, she knows just what he wants—after a few moments of wondering what this holy man could possibly be getting at. Best of all are Moaveni’s reports from everyday Iranian life about the locals’ myriad adaptations to a totalitarian regime. She takes up everything: the political climate, the female sphere, the distinction of public and private behavior, teenagers’ rebellion, the challenge of creating a career, even the quest to exercise without a veil. Moaveni makes Iran a distinct entity.
A must.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-193-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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