The captivating and candid story of a woman who took on the Iranian government and survived, despite every attempt to make...
A leading activist speaks out about inequality and injustices in Iran.
Stripped of her judgeship and demoted to clerk by the Iranian government in 1980, Ebadi (The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny, 2011, etc.) began taking on pro bono cases in the 1990s, defending the rights of children and women in Iran. For this work, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 (the first Muslim woman to do so), but she also came under far more serious scrutiny by the extremist rulers in Iran. With honesty and zeal, the author details how the Iranian government has used all manner of tactics to stop her from defending her clients. She was thrown into jail, her phones were bugged, and she was shadowed and watched by government officials; despite their efforts, she continued to defend those who came to her in need. After years of horrifying harassment, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government stepped up its efforts and detained Ebadi's daughter. They also increased their persecution of Ebadi's co-workers and other lawyers who also sought to rectify the inequalities so readily evident under the extremist leaders. When none of these tactics forced the author to stop speaking out about the injustices in Iran, the leaders went one step further and set her husband up in a sting operation, which almost caused her to back down. However, she knew if she caved to their demands, then they would have won, which was a situation that she could not tolerate. Ebadi's courage and strength of character are evident throughout this engrossing text, which illuminates the power the few have had over the many, particularly the women and children of Iran.
The captivating and candid story of a woman who took on the Iranian government and survived, despite every attempt to make her fail.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9887-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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