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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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