Carregue numa fotografia para ir para os Livros Google.
A carregar... Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran's 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Pricepor Afsaneh Moqadam
A carregar...
Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Prémios
Tehran, June 12, 2009. Mohsen Abbaspour, an ordinary young man in his twenties-not particularly political, or ambitious, or worldly-casts the first vote of his life in Iran's tenth presidential election. Fed up with rising unemployment and inflation, he backs the reformist party and its candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mohsen believes his vote will count.It will not. Almost the instant the polls close, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will declare himself president by an overwhelming majority. And as the Western world scrambles to make sense of the brazenly fraudulent election, Mohsen, along with his friends and family and neighbors, will experience a sense of utter desolation, and then something else: an increasingly sharper feeling-the beginning of anger. In a matter of weeks, millions of Iranians will flow into the streets, chanting in protest, "Death to the dictator!" Mohsen Abbaspour will be swept up in an uncontrollable and ultimately devastating chain of events.Like Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and Ryszard Kapuscinski's incisive reportage, Death to the Dictator! stuns listeners with its heartbreaking immediacy. Our pseudonymous author was a keen eyewitness in Tehran during the summer of 2009 and beyond. In this brave and true book, we see what we are not supposed to see and learn what we are not supposed to know. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
Current DiscussionsNenhum(a)Capas populares
Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)324.955Social sciences Political Science The political process Biography And History AsiaClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
É você?Torne-se num Autor LibraryThing. Tantor MediaUma edição deste livro foi publicada pela Tantor Media. |
In it, the pseudonymous author tells the tale of Mohsen Abbaspour, a young Iranian who is caught up in the 2009 election, starting with merely campaigning for Musavi, the reformist candidate, in order to impress a girl he likes. Soon, he's being more daring and committed than most of his friends, furious at the betrayal of his friends and family and his country by corrupt and violent leaders.
What is most impressive about this slim volume is the way the author portrays the story through Iranian eyes, and how revelatory this can be. For instance, it's not until the election results come in, showing an unbelievable swell of support for Ahmadinejad, that the real fury erupts. Iranians, the author writes, could have tolerated electing a candidate who proves disappointing or ineffective in office, but not having the election stolen from them. There are acute observations about the way the Iranians view the outside world as it views them -- they, the current embodiment of an ancient civilization, must surely be the focus of the world's attention and concern, constantly? So they analyze even offhand remarks for hidden meanings, and conspiracy theories flourish.
The book does an excellent job of taking the reader inside the state of mind of those Iranians we watched take to the streets on our television sets and it's a reminder of the heavy price many of them paid for their activism as well as the harsh realities that no one is a hero under torture. It's polemical, and there are a handful of descriptions of that torture (although done very carefully, so it's the atmosphere rather than the graphic details that are most chilling), but it's an excellent book. Highly recommended; 4.5 stars. A wake-up call to those of us tempted to become complacent and suggest that others just insist on their democratic rights -- and a reminder, in the wake of the recent events in the Middle East, that this isn't always as simple as we would like it to be or as we may perceive it to be from the outside. ( )