An admirable account that will be of special interest to those keeping their eyes on the Middle East.
Iranian jurist and attorney Ebadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, recounts a life of commitment to human rights in the face of tyranny.
Ebadi (with Time Islamic affairs correspondent Moaveni) wasn’t well known outside Iran when she won the Nobel, but she was renowned within the country for fighting for women’s rights. Too, she had recently turned up evidence that the Islamic Republic had been murdering intellectual critics of the regime “in the name of God.” The roving hit squads, most of whose members “were low-ranking functionaries of the Ministry of Intelligence,” had knifed or strangled dozens of victims by 2000, when Ebadi discovered her name on the list, about the time she was briefly imprisoned as an object lesson in what happens to those who question the regime. It was not the first time Ebadi, born into an influential family that fell on hard times under the Shah’s rule, had been in trouble with the law. Appointed a judge at 23, she was removed from office when the mullahs came to power; she recounts a meeting with Fathollah Bani-Sadr, who would rise to prominence in the Islamist regime, and who “suggested” that she veil herself in deference to “our beloved Imam Khomeini, who has graced Iran with his return.” The suggestion did not take, though many of her colleagues adapted quickly to the new government, just as, she observes, they did when Mossadegh was assassinated and the Shah took control. Steadfast in her commitment to democratic reform, Ebadi closes by praising her daughter’s generation for defying the “morals police” and pressing for civil rights, and she declares that “the [Bush administration’s] threat of regime change by military force . . . endangers nearly all of the efforts democracy-minded Iranians have made in these recent years.”
An admirable account that will be of special interest to those keeping their eyes on the Middle East.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6470-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
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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