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The Age of Orphans

Author: Laleh Khadivi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1608191583

Told with an evocative richness of language that recalls Michael Ondaatje or Anita Desai, the story of Reza Khourdi is that of the 20th century everyman, cast out from the clan in the name of nation, progress and modernity who cannot help but leave behind a shadow that yearns for the impossible dreams of love, land and home. Before following his father into battle, he had been like any other Kurdish boy: in love with his Maman, fascinated by birds and the rugged Zagros mountains, dutiful to his stern and powerful Baba. But after he becomes orphaned in a massacre by the armies of Iran's new Shah, Reza Pahlavi I.; he is taken in by the very army that has killed his parents, re-named Reza Khourdi, and indoctrinated into the modern, seductive ways of the newly minted nation, careful to hide his Kurdish origins with every step. The Age of Orphans follows Reza on his meteoric rise in ranks, his marriage to a proud Tehrani woman and his eventual deployment, as Capitan, back to the Zagros Mountains and the ever-defiant Kurds. Here Reza is responsible for policing, and sometimes killing, his own people, and it is here that his carefully crafted persona begins to fissure and crack.

The Age of Orphans

Author: Laleh Khadivi

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781408802533

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Kurdistan, Persia. A village high in the Zagros mountains. A small green-eyed boy wrestles free from his mother and climbs atop a straw and mud hut to gaze at the dusty landscape; the jagged mountains and azure sky, the cattle in the distance. With his arms stretched out beside him he pretends to be a bird, to lift up and soar over this land- the land of his fathers and forefathers. Kurdish land. Soon after he is ritually initiated into manhood, messengers from the hills bring whispers of war; rumours that the Shah's army is moving from village to village, stamping out any tribal rebellion that may stand in the way of the creation of a unified 'Iran'. Just nine years old, the boy must stand alongside his men and fight for their land. Years later, Reza Pahlavi Khourdi can only faintly recall the brutal murder of his father and cousins. Orphaned on the bloody battlefield, conscripted into the great column of the army and given a new name, he has quickly risen up the ranks, proving both his prowess in battle and allegiance to the Shah's troops. Now in Tehran, Reza is about to marry to a beautiful, educated, city girl, and become a Capitian. But there are stirrings within his heart. He will soon be sent west to be the Shah's servant in Kermanshah, the land of his birth, and a figurehead of modernization. At once rich and bleak, The Age of Orphans unleashes a tapestry of untold horrors and pleasures, of blood and smoke, hopes, dreams and desires. It is a profound and darkly poetic story of a land roughly sewn together under the ambitious imagining of a nation, and of the life of a boy, whose identity does not, can not, unite with this vision.

Africa's Orphaned and Vulnerable Generations

Author:

Publisher: UNICEF

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 9280640356

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Africa's Orphaned and Vulnerable Generations: Children affected by AIDS shows how the AIDS epidemic continues to affect children disproportionately and in many harmful ways, making them more vulnerable than other children, leaving many of them orphaned, and threatening their survival. Released by UNICEF, UNAIDS and PEPFAR (The US President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief), the report contains new and improved research on orphans and vulnerable children, including what governments, NGOs, the private sector and the international community can do to better respond.