A well-documented and persuasively written examination of the change in Iranian women’s status under the country’s secular...
A nuanced look at the role women have played in Iran in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In this debut nonfiction book, Ansary looks at the role of women in modern Iran from a sociopolitical perspective, pushing beyond stereotypes to assess the actual impacts of government policies, religious beliefs, and social norms on women’s lives. The book focuses on a key paradox of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. With the veil legalized and the coeducational classrooms of the previous era strictly segregated by sex, the clerics created an environment in which girls from traditional families could attend school without violating social norms, leading to an unintended increase in the education of women after the shah’s laws encouraging gender equity were repealed: “The fact is that the so-called Islamization of education has proven to be responsible for generating unprecedented educational gains for the vast majority of the female population.” Ansary also examines the roles of textbooks, which continue to depict women in professional roles, and women’s magazines, which have expressed and represented the views of women from across a spectrum of feminist beliefs. While she counters the stereotype of the veiled woman kept entirely under male control, Ansary does acknowledge that women’s rights have been curtailed under religious law; even reformist politicians are limited by the ayatollahs’ strictures. But Ansary is able to connect the restrictions on women’s freedom to the broader context of domestic politics in Iran, particularly the 2009 anti-government demonstrations. She notes, “Perhaps the government’s failed ideology has been most obvious to a defiant female population that continues to boldly protest their enforced status of inferiority.” The book, which is thoroughly footnoted, concludes with a series of captioned pictures of notable Iranian women. Although the book’s approach is often academic, with references to theories of child development and political structure, it maintains an engaging tone that makes it easy for casual readers to follow the arguments.
A well-documented and persuasively written examination of the change in Iranian women’s status under the country’s secular and religious governments.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0986406409
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Revela Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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