A literary study that derives its emotional power from Nafisi’s personal story and relationship.
The Iranian-American author of Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) makes a passionate argument for returning to key American novels in order to foster creativity and engagement.
Having taught literature both in post-revolutionary Iran and in America, teacher and author Nafisi (Things I’ve Been Silent About, 2008, etc.) finds in works by Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and Carson McCullers important lessons in combating nefarious trends in the West: insular thinking, bias and a utilitarian mindset. Literature, writes the author, is deliciously subversive because it fires the imagination and challenges the status quo. This can be dangerous in an authoritarian, repressive state such as Iran, but it is necessary for an informed citizenry. In America, however, where Nafisi became a citizen in 2008, she finds that the free access to democratic ideals and institutions have bred a complacency toward and even scorn for what cannot be used for political or ideological purposes, namely the liberal arts. In the character of Twain’s Huck Finn, Nafisi’s first and favorite example, she finds a quintessential American character from whom all others derive: a searching soul and a homeless “mongrel” whose “sound heart” gradually beats out his “deformed conscience.” In Babbitt, from Lewis’ 1922 eponymous novel, Nafisi reacquaints us with a smug, self-congratulatory figure of conformity who (still) mirrors our contemporary selves. In the fragile, childlike characters of McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Nafisi notes the yearning for personal integrity and shared humanity. The author’s literary exegesis lightly moves through her own experiences as a student, teacher, friend and new citizen. Touching on myriad literary examples, from L. Frank Baum to James Baldwin, her work is both poignant and informative.
A literary study that derives its emotional power from Nafisi’s personal story and relationship.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02606-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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