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 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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