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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, TBA ISBN: 1-4025-9084-9 Publisher: Recorded Books Pub. Date: May, 2004 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 12 List Price(USD): $34.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (110 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: a glimpse of Upsilamba!
Comment: Azar Nafisi has written a brilliant, moving, and frightening book. As a professor of English literature at Tehran University, she provides a unique perspective on the Iranian revolution that changed the world.
She considers herself an intellectual. She marched against the west and the USA support of the Shah of Iran. She tells of the joy that she and her colleagues felt at his fall. She tells of the changes in everyday life for intellectuals and for women as the Islamists took over the country. She left her job at the university (a job that she loved) because she refused to wear the veil. She tells of the effects of the eight year long Iraq/Iran war on the women of Tehran, the tyranny of the religious leaders who issue their decrees as though they came directly from God.
Nafisi's story is one of change, tyranny, fascism, and the failure in the 20th century to defend women when their identity and their humanity are stolen in the name of religion. It is also the story of personal courage, intelligence, commitment, and love.
Nafisi lead a book discussion group for a select group of women in her home in Tehran before leaving Iran. The forbidden fruit that they read was Lolita, Pride and Prejudice, Daisy Miller, and the Great Gatsby! They risked so much to do this; they risked imprisonment, beatings, rape, and perhaps execution.
She tells her story and some of the stories of her students through these group discussions. She has changed the name of the women that are still alive to protect them. She tells one of her student's stories. While in prison she knew of guards who repeatedly raped a young beautiful girl. They justified this punishment because their heinous acts would deny her access to heaven. In this interpretation of Islam, only virgins could go to heaven and God has no punishment for the rapists.
We, in the USA, live such safe, comfortable lives even in the wake of 9/11. Our free public libraries, bookstores, and Amazon.com provide such easy access to Nabokov, Austen, James, and Fitzgerald, and yet so few of us read them. We post public reviews on controversial books on Amazon.com accepting the minimal risk of a negative vote. What do we know of the Iranian revolution that in the name of Islam has made women invisible, that has morality police, and bans these dangerous books? Our respect for religious freedom makes us tenuous in dealing with atrocities committed in God's name!
I highly recommend this book.
Note to the author: if you are reading this, thank you for you have given us all a glimpse of Upsilamba!
Rating: 5
Summary: Fabulous! If you love and cherish books, read this now
Comment: What a fabulous find! Book-lovers should read this memoir of being female in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution contrasted with ideas and ideals of Western civilization as shown by great authors. Azir Nafisi, an English literature professor, has taken 4 novelists (Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen) and shown how the ideals written about in their novels espouse those desired by her and some of her female students in authoritarian Iran. The ability to show and feel love, freedom, imagination, and passion espoused in great novels can only be dreamed by the women portrayed in this book. They gather to study forbidden books, and to find words and outlets for the feelings of inadequacy, fear, loss, and longing in their hearts fostered by a government dismissive (and fearful) of women.
In addition to the internal struggles bravely portrayed, this book gives a fabulous cultural picture of life in Iran during and after the revolution. Beyond the political atmosphere, I felt the love Nafisi has for her native country and the people she left behind there.
Rating: 2
Summary: didnt like it either
Comment: I had a few probs with this book.
1. Nafisi talks at length about the vices of the islamic republic of iran - which i wholly empathize with - however, she fails to give substantial background on the how the country reached this state ie. the radical secularism that plagued the country only a generation before, under the 'shah'. And while this seems like a mere detail, its very significant, as it provides a sociological context for the political ongoings Nafisi writes so much about.
2. she seems a bit whiny to me and kind of passive....
3. maybe its bc i havent read most of the books she mentions, but I found her running commentaries on the books a bit boring and tedious. I felt like i was reading a book report or something.
4. the one thing i expected from this book was a heartwarming narrative of female bonding (think female"dead poets society" or "how to make an american quilt"). instead, i found the relationship nafisi conjurs somewhat empty and unsatisfying. i felt like she was trying to take me somewhere and we never got there.
so i didnt really like this book basically.
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Title: Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides ISBN: 0312422156 Publisher: Picador Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Kite Runner (Alex Awards (Awards)) by Khaled Hosseini ISBN: 1573222453 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 29 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Life of Pi by Yann Martel ISBN: 0156027321 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd ISBN: 0142001740 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 28 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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