Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

Book Overview

For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist's eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585426237
• ISBN13: 9781585426232
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Just finished Nahid Rachlin's fascinating memoir...

Well, Mrs. Rachlin has gained another fan. I was just mesmerized with the weave of her writings, in "Persian Girls". A fascinating depiction of the life, culture and traditions in Iran as she experienced them, and how they related to and affected her family and friends. I reccomend this book as a good read. Thank you Nahid Rachlin...

Excellent book...

This book is a "must read." I have never read a more touching non-fiction book. The writing is superb and it is from the heart. I was not able to put the book down and anyone vaguely interested in the subject matter will come to the same conclusion.

BOLD, UPLIFTING MEMOIR

After chancing upon a diminuative author reading a startlingly gutsy memoir to a bookstore audience, I ordered and read for myself the courageous adventures of Ms. Rachlin. The author's uncompromising rebelliousness coupled with her intense love for a sister and an aunt fuels the book. Bejeweled with many Iranian cultural details, (foods, fabrics, flowers, fountains, families, etc.), lovingly and simply described and set at the menacing center of turbulent historical and individual events, Nahid Rachlin has forged a spare, luminous memoir of human sorrows and victories. I think other readers will wish, as I did, that the book was longer.

Deeply Moving Memoir

In this poignant,intensely personal and informative memoir Nahid Rachlin traces her life from her childhood under the Shah, through the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which she witnessed from America, where she was living at that point, to a bittersweet reunion with a family both shattered and healed by the tragedies that have befallen them. The way her life goes in a different direction from that of her beloved sister, as she remains in Iran and she comes to the U.S., offers great insights into the dynamics of the culture they lived in and how it affected each. It is a story of painful separations, heartbreaking losses, and hard-won freedoms. It has the same mesmerizing power as her novels, lingering in the mind after we have finished reading the book.

A Powerful Memoir

This book kept me up all night. Among other things it gave me a glimpse into the inner workings of Iranian family life and the author's creative development. As a fan of Nahid Rachlin's fiction, I wanted to know more about her own life; Persian Girls has given me an insight into that life and its emotional conflict. It reveals the suffering that many women, among them her sister, and the aunt who raised her as a child, endure in many Islamic cultures--the limitations imposed on them by the legal system and their families, especially the husbands who rule over them with tyrannical power. The oppressiveness and the pain of separation the author endured when her father took her away from her aunt the only mother she knew as a child (and forced her to live with him and her biological mother and siblings) are deeply conveyed. And so is the strength the author found within herself that allowed her to break away from these restrictions and create another life in America.