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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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