The Road to Home
My Life and Times
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Vartan Gregorian's tale starts with a childhood of poverty, deprivation, and enchantment in the Armenian quarter of Tabriz, Iran. As the world reeled from depression into six years of warfare, his mother died, leaving his grandmother Voski as the loving staff of his life. Through unlettered example and instruction, he learned about the first of his many worlds: the strenuousness required for survival, the fairy tale that explained existence, the place and name of his own star in the night sky, how to maneuver as a member of a Christian minority in a benevolent Muslim kingdom, the beauty and inspiration of Armenian Church liturgy, the exciting foreign world of ten-year-old American westerns, the richness of life on the streets.
He learned the magic of the innumerable worlds he could find in books -- and he wanted to visit them all. As the spell books cast on him grew more powerful, so did the constraints imposed by his father's indifference to his dreams of redirecting his life through learning.
So, one day when he was fifteen years old, he presented himself at an Armenian-French lycee in Beirut, Lebanon, to start the arduous task of becoming a person of learning and consequence.
This book tells not only how he reached that school but also about the many people who guided, supported, taught, and helped him on an extravagantly absorbing and varied journey from Tabriz to Beirut to Palo Alto to Tenafly to London, from Stanford University to San Francisco State University to the University of Texas at Austin to the University of Pennsylvania to the New York Public Library to Brown University and, currently, to the presidency of Carnegie Corporation of New York.
With witty stories and memorable encounters, Dr. Gregorian describes his public and private lives as one education after another. He has written a love story about life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rags-to-riches memoir, Gregorian explains how he went from a childhood in a poor section of Tabriz, Iran, to become president of the New York Public Library and, later, the president of Brown University. Now the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Gregorian did travel the time-worn, conventional path of hard work and sheer grit, but he also had the dedicated help of friends and the fortuitous aid of strangers. Gregorian is uncommonly generous in acknowledging these blessings, yet his dominant tone of gratitude and grace doesn't preclude settling some scores, especially with regard to his candidacy for president of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was provost from 1978 to 1981. The book's detail is daunting listing books Gregorian read, courses he took, movies he saw, papers he wrote and women he dated but the author's educational history is educational in and of itself. A polyglot, "intoxicated with reading" and steeped in the Middle East's intricate, tangled saga, Gregorian opens a doorway to history and to Persian and Armenian literature. As he achieves his well-merited and much-honored success, the book's early vibrancy and immediacy dwindle into an archival record, covering speeches, fund-raising dinners, finances, bureaucratic details and the minutiae of administering large institutions. Still, on the way to Park Avenue, Gregorian shows readers other worlds (e.g., Beirut when it resembled Paris; Kandahar and Kabul before the Taliban) and sees more familiar worlds (e.g., New York, San Francisco, Paris, Moscow) with a newcomer's sense of wonder, eyes so fresh that he tries to eat his first banana without peeling it.
