Iran Awakening

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope by Shirin Ebadi

From my first contact browsing through the introduction at the library, I was 'hooked' and felt I had to bring the book home with me and continue reading.
The story in the introduction recounts how Ebadi, a lawyer in present day Iran, was browsing through stacks of case materials and was shocked to find her own name on a list of individuals who were marked for assassination by local death squads.

For the remainder of the book, Ebadi recounts her upbringing in the 50's and 60's in Iran, and traces her route through law school to becoming a well respected judge in Tehran. This all changed with the Iranian revolution in 1979. Even though she got caught up in the idealism of the movement, she was shocked to see how the culture changed so radically to restrict the voices and rights of women. Losing her position as a judge and relegated to a clerk's job in a back room, she eventually had to retire. She was not able to use her law qualifications to work under the oppressive new regime.

Ebadi did persist though, and found a voice through writing and became well known as a dissident voice. Eventually, after decades of oppression, the government went through some changes that allowed her to practice law again in the late '90s. She worked mostly for free, championing the rights of the oppressed by taking on cases that exposed the corruption and ruthlessness in the government. People were still being killed and imprisoned in crackdowns for being opposed to government policies. Ebadi herself was imprisoned for many months without clear charges. Eventually, she exposed key players that had been terrorizing the intellectual community. In 2003, she was award the Nobel Peace Prize.

To read more about Shirin Ebadi, please consult an entry for her in Wikipedia. -John

Female Chauvinist Pigs

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy

I first became aware of this book when the author was a guest on the Colbert Report and I immediately felt a sense of recognition. I realized that she was touching on something that I have felt for some time, and no doubt many others have felt as well. Levy, a writer for New York Magazine, explores how raunch culture have gone mainstream and questions whether the new model of the "empowered" woman is really what feminists fought for. She argues that far from being liberating and pleasurable, the new culture is actually forcing a kind of narrow conformity. She shows how many women themselves have bought into the objectification of women, feeling they need to embrace the sleaze culture, or appear to be repressed or prudish. Levy thinks there is another way, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Liars and Saints

Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy. I confess that I actually picked up this book book after reading that the author is the sister of Colin Meloy, the lead singer/songwriter of one of my current new musical infatuations - The Decemberists! I learned that Maile Meloy is an acclaimed and award winning writer, and that her first novel Liars and Saints received mostly rave reviews from all the major publications, so I had to check it out.
The novel was a quick and engrossing read, following the lives of an American Catholic family over several generations, beginning in WWII, and ending at the dawn of the new millennium. Any summary of the plot would make it sound like one of those big, sprawling, melodramatic dysfunctional family dramas, but it is actually very understated and written in spare and unembellished prose. Much of the action hinges on the multi-generational effects of a single deception. The characters all seemed very real and believable and many of the passages had a subtle power. The plot moves quickly and covers a tremendous amount of ground, sometimes taking pretty dramatic and extreme twists, but always told in that plain and spare style.

The Worthy: a Ghost's Story

The Worthy: a Ghost's Story - by Will Clarke

I picked up Clarke's first novel, Lord Vishnu's Love Handles, earlier this year and found that I couldn't put it down. The crazy story about a shallow, materialistic Dallas dot.commer with psychic abilities who gets drawn into working for the CIA as a psychic spy, loses everything, and eventually achieves some kind of spiritual redemption, was at times over-the-top, but full of vivid observations and witty prose. So I was curious to see what The Worthy would be like. Suddenly, Clarke is hot - in fact, he has just been listed as "Hot Pop Prophet" in Rolling Stone's latest Hot List, and both his books have been bought by Hollywood. (Lord Vishnu is reportedly set to be produced by Michael London who did Sideways). The Worthy was actually written before Lord Vishnu, but published after the other's success. It's quite a success story - Clarke self published Lord Vishnu and it really took off on Amazon, achieving a kind of cult status. He is now signed with Simon & Schuster.
The Worthy is about the ghost of a frat boy who was brutally killed in a hazing incident at a southern university fraternity. Conrad, the ghost, is another somewhat shallow, privileged character, who, by the book's end has achieved a certain amount of growth and compassion. Conrad haunts the campus, obsessed with avenging his death. The only people who can see him are the college's elderly african-american cook, and a wacky religious sorority girl. Much mayhem ensues as he finds he can temporarily possess the bodies of the living, especially an oversized, rather dimwitted fraternity pledge. Fraternity life is depicted in all its obnoxious and appalling detail, but there's always this other level at work. (The New York Times recently said of Clarke that "his plotting reveals a man who thinks like Will Ferrell and dreams like Samuel Taylor Coleridge."!) The plot takes a lot of crazy twists but ultimately leads to a resolution that I found pretty satisfying.