Silent River, Empty Night
by Ralph Salimpour, MD
Published by Outskirts Press
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Reviewed by Michele Heather Pollock
What makes a memoir worth writing (and reading)? An exciting and interesting life? If that alone were true, then Silent River, Empty Night by Dr. Ralph Salimpour should be among the memoirs worth checking out.
As a pediatrician in Iran, Dr. Salimpour faced challenges and witnessed hardships most Western Europeans and Americans can hardly imagine, from epidemics of meningitis to the People’s Revolution in Iran leading to Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power and the religious fundamentalism that followed. From his medical studies, through his flight with his family to the United States to escape repression and possibly even death, Dr. Salimpour has great stories to tell.
Unfortunately, his story-telling ability and facility with English grammar do not stand up to the task. Throughout, Silent River, Empty Night is plagued with grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors that make it difficult to read. The dialogue is stilted and the descriptive passages amateurish. The chronology of the book jumps around and is difficult to follow, and some of even the most interesting stories are retold too many times throughout the book.
Silent River, Empty Night would have benefited greatly from a thorough, professional editing job before publication.
It is unfortunate, because Dr. Salimpour has a good story to tell. He is a highly acclaimed and accomplished physician, a generous man and good of heart. But he is not a writer, and it is his book and not his life that is under discussion here. Perhaps his story would have been better told if a professional writer had helped to co-write or to edit the book.
For those deeply interested in Middle Eastern issues or culture, it might be worth fighting through the book to get a first-person account of life in Iran before, during and after the rise of Khomeini. For the general reader, however, it might be too much to ask.
Armchair Interviews says: Heed the reviewer’s comments about the story, not the storyteller.
Author’s Web site: http://www.RalphSalimpourMD.com