Nearly unbearable revelations by a brave writer determined to embrace life rather than despair.
An Iranian political activist presents a trenchant, poised memoir of her horrific periods of incarceration in Iran.
Arrested first in 1977 by SAVAK agents under the Shah’s repressive regime, then again in 1983 in Tehran and held for nine years in the infamous Evin Prison, Talebi (Religious Studies/Arizona State Univ.) endured searing trauma during this tumultuous era of Iranian history. In her frank memoir that reads all the more affectingly because of its tone of matter-of-fact testimony, she dredges up painful memories of torture, solitary confinement, ritual humiliation and forced confessions, and offers portrayals of fellow inmates who either escaped into madness or were executed, such as her husband, Hamid. The author is determined to honor these “ghosts”—“I did not submit, nor did I go crazy, but I felt the burden and the responsibility of giving voice to those who were, in one way or another, lost.” Having grown up mostly in the provinces, and just entering her first year of college in Tehran, Talebi was a naïve political activist in 1977, determined to uphold her ideals of justice. After her arrest, she was held for a year and then released in 1978, as part of the country’s “roaring rivers” of demonstrations and demands against the Shah. Her longer stint of incarceration, between 1983 and 1992, warrants the balk of this account, and it is a period that included the machinations of the Islamic Republic and the massacre of 5,000 political prisoners in 1988. The new penal policy extracted denunciations of prisoners’ past activities and negotiations by their families, both of which Talebi rejected. She writes movingly of brutalized inmates like Roya, Fozi and Kobra, and especially Hamid, who was tortured in front of her and later executed. After her release, Talebi would have to answer her relatives’ harmful accusations of not doing enough to save her husband.
Nearly unbearable revelations by a brave writer determined to embrace life rather than despair.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7201-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
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
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