Stark and haunting, this book stands as a powerful testament to not only the devastations of an era, but to the integrity...
An acclaimed Iranian novelist’s harrowing account of the decade she spent in and out of prisons in post-revolutionary Tehran.
When Parsipur (Women Without Men, 1998, etc.) returned to Iran from France in 1980, she knew the country she had fled was in turmoil. She remained on the political sidelines, reading newspapers and magazines from the different factions vying for power just to stay informed. Her democratic neutrality did not save her, however. In 1981, she was jailed after the revolutionary guards who ransacked her home discovered a letter she had written but not sent that expressed her misgivings about the political situation in Iran. With a self-possessed simplicity that cuts straight to the heart, Parsipur details the nearly five years of what would be the first of three incarcerations. Fundamentalist Islamic dress and religious rituals were de rigueur for all prisoners, and solitary confinement or death awaited “nonconformists” like Parsipur. Kindness existed, but barbaric behavior among both inmates and the keepers with whom they often colluded was as much the norm as torture and random executions. “Fear had created monsters willing to do anything and go against any principal to survive,” she writes. What Parsipur found most disturbing of all was the fact that most of the prisoners and “officials” were barely out of their teens. After her release, her activities as a writer—and in particular, her novelistic writings on female virginity—led to two subsequent arrests and incarcerations. Harried to the point of illness and eventual mental collapse by the Iranian morality police, Parsipur left the country permanently.
Stark and haunting, this book stands as a powerful testament to not only the devastations of an era, but to the integrity and courage of an extraordinary woman.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55861-816-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
