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List Price: $21.95
Our Price: $31.87
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Villard
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Villard
Manufacturer: Villard
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2003-06-17
Publisher: Villard
Release Date: 2003-06-17
Studio: Villard
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Editorial Reviews:
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This new Readers Circle edition includes a reading group guide and a conversation between Firoozeh Dumas and Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.”
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since.
Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
In a series of deftly drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American English (hot dogs and hush puppies?—a complete mystery), American traditions (Thanksgiving turkey?—an even greater mystery, since it tastes like nothing), and American culture (Firoozeh’s parents laugh uproariously at Bob Hope on television, although they don’t get the jokes even when she translates them into Farsi).
Above all, this is an unforgettable story of identity, discovery, and the power of family love. It is a book that will leave us all laughing—without an accent.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hilarious!
Comment: This is without a doubt one of the best memoirs I have read -- and I've read a lot. Dumas treats even the toughest of topics (discrimination, political issues, etc.) with humor and humanity. The stories of her immigration to the US from Iran at an early age are hilarious, touching, and universal. Her book reminds readers that immigrants are, first and foremost, people.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A few highlights but mostly disappointing
Comment: Tries very hard to be hilarious but doesn't succeed. There are several amusing stories but I feel that she writes at the expense of her family. Perhaps her family does not mind this - I think I would. Short vignettes, some quite poignant, as when her father lost his job and when there was so much anti-Iranian feeling after the Iranian Revolution. It was disjointed - going back and forth from when she was 7 to when she had kids, then back to high school, then to her wedding. I was mildly disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I heard (about) it on NPR
Comment: I really enjoyed reading this book. My family, by birth and by marriage, is a family of immigrants. Heavily accented english is not strange to my ear, and while the accents I have heard may have been yiddish and Ukrainian (and most recently, Southern drawl here in Charleston), it is not that far a stretch to Farsi.
Things I enjoyed? The evident love and humor that pervades this family, the descriptions of traditions and foods, the opportunity to look at America through different eyes. I found myself telling my fifteen year old son about "Fritzy DumbAss" and we both really could relate- given the last name we have. Z in a name really throws people off; take my word on that. (My favorite massacare of our name was "Romannawhiskey". Makes one pause and wonder.) I also told him the story of her aunt who didn't go to college, but figured out how to cure the chickens that were dying. I told my mother (both her parents immigrated in the early 1900s) some of the stories involving thick accents and the fractured English. (One of my Grandmother's famous sayings was when she said in anger "In hell mit you!".
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've read this year
Comment: Funny in Farsi is one of the best books I've read this year. I laughed until I cried, and while laughing, I learned a lot about the Iranian-American and immigrant experience. The author is talented at using humor to poke fun at herself, her family, Iran, and America, and yet the reader comes away adoring her family all the more and appreciating both Iran and the USA all the more. I highly recommend her second book "Laughing without an Accent."
Customer Rating:
Summary: The book speaks of the writer's weak English, hence it is too elementary
Comment: The only folks this book maybe funny to are the type of Iranians who have little mastery of the English language. I found the writing skill to be too elementary for anyone with educations beyond the high school level. I have to say that I have not read the Farsi translation of it which incidentally I have heard is much better than its English version.
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