Rearview: the Journey and Cost

Rearview: The Journey and the Cost He left Iran at thirteen with a dictionary, his father's camera, and a blanket from his own bed. His father stood in front of the house and watched the car disappear around the corner. His son was getting smaller in the windshield. The son was watching his father get smaller in the rear view mirror. Two people losing each other from opposite ends of the same moment, with no way to call, no way to write fast enough, no way to close the distance that was already opening between them. He was heading to Canada - the land his mentor had described as free. The place where you could let the wind blow through your hair and simply breathe. What he found when he got there is the question this book spends a lifetime asking. Rearview: The Journey and the Cost is the memoir of an Iranian-born Canadian who left one of the world's oldest civilisations - a land that gave humanity its first declaration of human rights, its first postal system, its first university - and spent forty years in Canada wondering whether the freedom he crossed an ocean for was ever real, or whether freedom simply came with a cost nobody had warned him about. It is not a story of gratitude. It is not a story of bitterness either. >It is the story of a man who, at retirement, finally stops long enough to look in the rearview mirror - and asks whether what he was running toward was worth what he was running from. Told through ancient Persian poetry and philosophy, through letters that crossed oceans, through the artifacts of a life packed into a bag at thirteen and carried for forty years, this memoir does not offer easy answers. But it does offer something rarer. The moment a man stops searching and begins, for the first time, to simply live.