Honest in its queen's-eye sentiments, but so selective in its memories and filled with glaring omissions that it fails...
Flat, unconvincing apologia-cum-memoir of the Shah’s years as ruler of Iran, from the ex-Shabanou.
Pahlavi is on stable ground at first, describing her life as a young girl in a household of middle-class royalists, the social rhythms of her life in Tehran during the 1940s and ’50s, her love of the poets Ferdowsi and Hafez, the education her family sought for her, and her early exposure to religious intolerance—a foretaste of things to come. But when she marries the Shah, her prose takes on a defensive tone that makes her claims for his progressiveness deeply suspect. Pahlavi trumpets the merits of the White Revolution, with its gestures at land reform and its undoubted achievements in literacy and extending the vote to women, but is hesitant to give full voice to the shortcomings of land distribution, to the extent of cronyism and economic corruption, and to the circumscription of political participation. She conveniently forgets to mention the CIA’s involvement in the return of the Shah to power after the period of the National Front, nor does she acknowledge the sway the US had over Iranian relations in the region. She dismisses the horrendous behavior of the secret police (“quite often heavy-handed, as happens in most developing countries”) and fails to accept that by denying open political expression, leaving fundamentalist religious organizations as the only large-scale, organized channels of resistance, the Shah paved the way for fanaticism to have its way in the revolution of 1979. Many readers will also be put off by the author’s slavish devotion to the Shah and his infallibility; she is incredulous and adoring when she notes that her husband, his days numbered, actually made a speech “going so far as to admit that he had made mistakes.”
Honest in its queen's-eye sentiments, but so selective in its memories and filled with glaring omissions that it fails miserably to inspire any faith in the author’s perspective.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-5209-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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