The Road to Home: My Life and Times FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this humorous, learned, and moving memoir, Vartan Gregorian recounts his journey from an impoverished childhood as a Christian Armenian in Muslim Tabriz to cultured citizen of the world. Gregorian's odyssey begins in an obscure poor quarter of a provincial city (thought by some to be the location of the Garden of Eden). Childhood centered on his brilliant, beloved, illiterate grandmother who taught him so much, the beauty of Church, school, American movies, and the larger world he read about in his borrowed books. From there, he continued on to a Beirut lycee, Stanford University, and the presidencies of the New York Public Library, Brown University, and Carnegie Corporation. Like Jimmy Carter in An Hour Before Daylight, and in the tradition of Nabokov, Jill Ker Conway, and V. S. Naipaul, he tells us that education is an openness to everything, and describes his public and private life as one education after another. This is a love story about life.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
What you see is what you get, and what you get is the full account of a worthwhile life that has rewarded thousands of students and more thousands of readers. If the word had not been so badly debased in our time, I would call him a civilian hero.
— Peter Gay
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. (June 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
How a Christian Armenian left Muslim Tabriz and eventually acceded to the presidencies of the Carnegie Corporation, Brown University, and the New York Public Library. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The restless Gregorian—presidencies at the New York Public Library, Brown University, the Carnegie Corporation—offers a memoir that expertly blends poetry, pedantry, progressivism, and unruly university politics. By his fourth sentence, Gregorian is already engaged in a scholarly discourse on the identity of biblical rivers—and so the book continues, with Gregorian always happy to drop in a few lines of Robert Frost, say, or to explain how The Sorrows of Young Werther captures his feelings after a love affair falls apart. For Gregorian is all about brains—big brains, using them nimbly, honestly, compassionately—starting with his grandmother�s teachings when he was a poor youth in Tabriz, Iran, right through to his present post at the Carnegie Corporation. Getting there wasn�t easy, and what a story it makes: leaving Iran, alone and destitute, to study in Beirut; gaining entrance to Stanford; and teaching at San Francisco State in the mid- to late-1960s (where he was faculty advisor to the Progressive Labor Party: Gregorian is equally at ease talking about the vagaries of the history of the Caucasus or about the split in SDS). The author bounces from the University of Texas to Penn, keeping one hand busy with his teaching while dipping the other into the mire of university politics. He is brilliant in delineating the backstabbing, pettiness, and obfuscations he contended with in order to raise the level of educational quality when he was dean at various schools. He has a light touch, knowing when to coax the reader gently through an intricate piece of philanthropic politics, and when to let rip: "I was not a Mr. Magoo. If somebody spits at me, I cannot pretend itis a raindrop." His stint at the NYPL and now at Carnegie allows him to fuse learning with philanthropy—but his loss from academia is a great one. Gregorian made an important life for himself the old-fashioned way, by earning every little bit of it.
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