A powerful and uplifting memoir of tragedy and healing.
A New York–based clinical psychologist tells the moving story of the life-changing trauma she and her family suffered as a result of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
For the first four years of her life, Andalibian grew up in the protected space of her family and the Rose Hotel, a luxury guesthouse her father ran for pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mashhad. Everything changed in late 1978 when her father became entangled in a web of religious and political intrigue involving a woman and her two teenage rapists. The new regime of Ayatollah Khomeini promised a fresh start to what everyone believed would be a more just society. Then Iranian courts charged—and later executed—Andalibian’s oldest brother, Abdollah, for a crime he didn’t commit. To protect the family, her parents told their remaining children that he had gone to America to study; yet the lie did nothing to stop the family from moving into a dark spiral of despair. In the difficult years that followed, the Andalibians moved away from their beloved Rose Hotel. Later, a health crisis forced the author’s mother to seek medical care in London and forced a long period of separation between the author and two brothers. Even after the family reunited and then immigrated a second time to Southern California, memories of their old life in Iran and of Abdollah’s “disappearance” continued to haunt them. Her parents, especially her devout Muslim father, were adrift in a Western society they could neither entirely accept nor understand, while alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce and undiagnosed mental illness plagued their children. Through a fierce love that was often tested beyond its limits, Andalibian helped her family understand the necessity of revealing long-held secrets and accepting each other’s foibles and vulnerabilities. Only then could they finally emerge, scarred but whole, “from its shadows.”
A powerful and uplifting memoir of tragedy and healing.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1479-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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