On a scale of Donald Drumpf to Samantha Power (United States Ambassador to the United Nations) regarding my knowledge of the geopolitical landscape, I would rate somewhere in the middle, as I had to Google to figure out who to herald as an example of someone very well knowledgeable regarding world events, but I knew what the word “geopolitical” meant. That being said, I wasn’t terribly familiar with the history and current events of Iran, and this memoir was a stark look at what it […]
The Iran We Didn’t Know as Told by a Damn Smart Woman
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel is both an autobiography and an historical/political education. Her simple yet bold black and white drawings beautifully illustrate the story of her childhood in Teheran in the early 1980s, her teen years in Vienna and her return to Iran in 1989. As an observer of and participant in Iran’s revolutionary upheaval, Satrapi gives a personal view of events and their effect on her family’s welfare while neatly outlining the complicated and complex national story that serves as their context. This is […]
A Tale of Two Worlds
This is an exquisite debut novel with the mixed flavors of Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and even a taste of the powerful memoir Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It is a story about culture clash, immigration, tradition, and love in all its many forms. Maryam Mazar is a middle-aged wife and mother, married to an Englishman, living in London and dreaming of her former life in Iran. Her beloved sister back home has just died and her teenaged […]