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The Good Side of the River

其他書名	Stories of Tradition, Change, and Survival
出版	Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp, 2024-06-10
主題	Biography & Autobiography / Survival
ISBN	9798326118240
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=8WbL0AEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Start a journey with the author from an ancient culture struggling with rapid sociopolitical changes that frequently clashed with traditional ways of life, to a world on the other side of the ocean in which you become an immigrant. Begin as a nine-year-old boy living in a slum on the side of the Bahmanshir River --across from the vibrant industrial city of Abadan. Share his dreams of living on the "good" side of the river that separated his supportive closed-knit but poor community from the alluring material comforts and modernity of the other side. Find yourself emotionally engaged in the symbolic reappearance of that idealized side --that itself is marred in contradictions-- throughout the book, in stories occurring from 1950's Iran to 2020's United States.
Using a story-telling style, an experienced social researcher weaves a colorful tapestry of times and places that the reader can vicariously experience; from childhood fears, anxieties, and dreams of breaking away from poverty to major life-changing moves that required taking significant risks, often incurring considerable emotional costs. The author takes you with him from a -paradoxically-- very beautiful and utterly impoverished place, through a fast-changing world in which he had to adapt to major cultural and sociopolitical shocks including a revolution, Iran-US hostage crisis, a devastating war, immigration, and change of his citizenship.
The book ends with a personal analysis of the emotional burdens of immigration -longing, guilt, anxiety, loneliness, depression, and alienation from both worlds-encouraging the reader to decide which side of the symbolic river was/is the "good" one.