A pleasing combination of intriguing local color and cultural and historical depth.
Economist Tehran correspondent De Bellaigue (Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town, 2010, etc.) uses plenty of local insight to provide general readers with an intriguing combination of biography, history and strategic study.
Muhammad Mossadegh's influence still lives in the imagination of Iranians. His family estate is a place of pilgrimage, even while the Ayatollahs denounce him as a British agent. The author dissolves the black and white of this posturing into more ambiguous grays, portraying Mossadegh as a constitutionalist attempting to combine the movements of democrats and the Islamic faithful who, known for nationalizing the country's oil, also introduced wide-ranging reforms of property ownership, education and women's rights, many of which were later repealed. Months before the 1953 coup, Mossadegh failed to recognize the agreement offered to him. De Bellaigue portrays the young Shah as a fearful, vacillating leader who frequently undercut his own supporters, thereby providing opportunities to opponents like Mossadegh. The author also examines the profound rift between America and Britain, with the latter, particularly under Churchill, stubbornly reluctant to make concessions on oil even as its position was undermined by American profit-sharing agreements with other producers. Ultimately, Cold War politics brought the two countries together. De Bellaigue's history brings together elements of miscomprehension, accident, chance, surprise, mistaken loyalties and revenge-driven shifts in political alliances. In exploring the story of Mossadegh and his family, the author also shows how Iran, because of its oil, became a pawn in the Anglo-Russian rivalry.
A pleasing combination of intriguing local color and cultural and historical depth.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-184470-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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
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
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