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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gregorian is enchanting in this delightful memoir, February 24, 2005
This review is from: The Road to Home: My Life and Times (Hardcover)
I first learned of Vartan Gregorian when he became provost of the University of Pennsylvania while I was attending grad school there. He was a colorful figure who seemed to be as much at odds with the university as the contentious students during the turbulent late 70's. Later, he went on to head the New York Public Library and then Brown University. He seemed to have a magical way to become influential and well-liked. After reading this book, I liked him a lot and wished I'd had a chance to know him while I was at Penn. Gregorian is a man of letters and great charisma.
Gregorian's story of his life is as charming as his public persona. From the opening lines about his life in Tabriz, Iran as a member of the Armenian minority community there, to his wise grandmother who raised him, his life is exciting and fraught with tragedy and pitfalls. His mother dies in childbirth and his father essentially abandons the family. Somehow, Vartan manages to find an education despite great difficulties and he is sponsored finally to go to the Armenian University in Beirut. From there, his career as a professor and man of letters takes off and he soars, always helped by friends of influence who provide that wind under his wings. And he's grateful. He moves some thirty times (not thirty jobs, as he points out) and goes from Stanford to Texas to Penn, to New York and places in between. All along he meets luminaries like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the Queen of England, makes friends with former BU president John Silber and yet seems to stay folksy and unaffected by all the glitter.
The book is highly readable and a fine memoir--whether you've heard of Gregorian or not, this is a wonderful tale about a man who overcame ridiculously bad odds to become one of America's most influential public figures in education. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An improbable Yet Authentic Armenian-American Success Story, May 24, 2005
This review is from: The Road to Home: My Life and Times (Hardcover)
Vartan Gregorian's autobiographic tract, "A Road to Home," tells an extraordinary story. It is the quintessential American Success Story. Here is an Armenian immigrant who comes from a village in Northern Iran, with his high school education completed in Jemaran, the Armenian School of considerable note in Beirut, who earns a BA and a PhD from Stanford (in history, specialty: Afghanistan), teaches at San Francisco State and UT, Austin, ends up being Dean, Provost and almost the President of U. Penn., rescues and forges the renaissance of the New York City public library system from imminent disaster by taking over as president for eight years, becomes the president of Brown University for the next nine years and along the way, turns down the Chancellorship of UC Berkeley, the Presidency of Columbia Univ., Univ. of Miami, Univ. of Michigan, Univ. of Rochester and many others, before becoming president of the Carnegie Corporation.
That pinnacle of academic positions of leadership, the presidency of a university, is not a chance given to very many people. That privilege of being the visionary leader of an institution of higher learning (as well as its chief fund raiser) is reserved to the best of the best and Vartan Gregorian has been one of the most sought after candidates for that post over the last twenty years being on almost everyone's short list! To say that he went from humble beginnings to the very top of the intellectual and academic life in America is to considerably understate the miracles that have paved the way of this deserving and gifted man's life journey. The perilous road that has lead him to the zenith of what America has to offer a scholar is depicted with great humility and panache in the pages of "The Road to Home," a Simon and Schuster 2003 publication. Everyone interested in how fate outstrips logic and predictability ought to read this book. Here is the chronicle of how the brilliance of a kid is first noted and appreciated enough somehow (by a French consular Attache' who happens to be Armenian) and then rewarded and protected by a long chain of benefactors and friends in the middle East (mostly Armenians) and in America (Armenians and many more non Armenians) both, catapulting a strange boy in great need for love and acceptance to shine as an intellectual and scholar, to conquer the toughest of tasks as an administrator, mediator, moderator, visionary, fund raiser, diplomat, keeper of the faith, lighter of the torch of knowledge and learning in Philadelphia, in New York City, in Providence, Rhode Island and in New York City again where, since 1997, he has been the president of the Carnegie Corporation which is a philanthropic organization of great weight and import in the cultural life of America and indeed the world. There are many immigrant stories that make America's spinning roulette wheel of success seem impossible to believe. Here is another such spectacular tale told by the master communicator himself, the staunch believer in education, the power of books, the beauty of scholarship and a man who has found his niche in high society and academe in America against impossible odds.
Imagine a young boy in Tabriz, Iran, born in 1934 to Armenian parents in this Northern Province of Persia known as Azerbaijan. His mother, Shoushig, dies when he is six and a half years old. Together with his little sister Ojik, he is raised by their maternal grandmother, Voski Mirzaian. Her's is the strongest and most lasting influence on this poor boy's life. She is mother and father and grandmother to them since their father is never around, working elsewhere, such as near oil fields, to make ends meet, and is never a warm father anyway, even when he is around. In fact, he is a strange, cold, distant, remarried man who never encourages little Vartanig, never teaches him anything (even though he gives private English lessons to others), never gives him any sort of advice or love of any sort! These circumstances alone ought to be enough to scar a man for life and make it hard for him to have sufficient self-confidence to make it in this cruel world. Add to that the changing of hands of their province between Persia and Soviet Russia, the Second World War, depravity, being part of a Christian Minority in an overwhelmingly Muslim city and country, poverty, lack of food, clothing, proper shelter, constant peril and it is a miracle indeed that this boy grew up to amount to anything at all. The details of these harrowing times are depicted with great care and meticulous detail in the first fifth of the book, The Road to Home. Here we have the familiar positive influence of the Armenian Church, becoming an acolyte and developing a very warm relationship with the steady, ancient tradition of the liturgy and faith that is the hallmark of the Armenian Apostolic tradition. The solace Vartanig derives from these experiences acts as a counterweight to the lack of love and nourishment at home under his father's roof with his younger wife who cares very little for him or his sister. Vartan has his grandmother who teaches him wisdom, myth, faith, morality, history and traditional Armenian tall tails all brewed in one living magic cauldron. Stars and winds and ghosts and other mythological figures intermingle and fire up this precocious boy's imagination as a steady nightly diet administered by his grandmother and her tender loving care. It is remarkable how much of this he reproduces more than fifty years later in the pages of his autobiography. His is a genuine and profound love for his grandmother. Plus, he is far too intelligent not to absorb all he can learn from her about life and this world naturally. Vartan grows and observes the changing world around him. Soviet communists come and go, muslem extremism is always suspected to be a palpable threat to the Armenians and to all Christian boys and girls in particular. Pedophiliacs must be avoided and are rumored to be all around. Street fights with Muslim boys are routine. Vartan reaches his teen years, attending school with worn out shoes, without money to buy books but able to read everything written in Armenian he can get his hands on at the library of the Armenian church and community center. He then starts to write for the Armenian newspaper "Alik" as well about daily affairs and even deliver eulogies at the funeral of important Armenian citizens of Tabriz. From these surroundings, he is somehow able to extricate himself at the age of fifteen at the bold suggestion of the French Vice-consul, Edgar Maloyan, who instructs him he go to Beirut and attend high school at Jemaran. The first turning point or plot point of this story is his grandmother authorizing his departure knowing that it is best for him and his future to leave their village and embrace the larger world. The crown jewel of Armenian schools in Beirut in the fifties with an emphasis on French (and Arabic) instruction and a thorough Armenian education including classical Armenian and Armenian history and culture beyond a normal high school degree was Nshan Palanjian Jemaran. But such a school was simply unreachable for a poor boy from Tabriz whose father would not be of any help and who spoke no Arabic or French to begin with! But he did manage to go to Beirut on his own with just $50 to his name, find people to sponsor him, to take him under their wings, nurture him, find money for him, donate food, arrange make shift dwelling at some sort of "Hotel Luxe" until boarding school facilities were inaugurated a few years hence, and even teach him French on the side so that he could catch up and graduate a few years behind schedule but brilliantly. This unlikely passage to Beirut and an institution of higher learning, makes Vartan think of the words of Graham Greene who once said and he quotes: " There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." That was Vartan's moment.
It is at Jemaran that his knack for being noticed, appreciated, aided and nurtured takes root in earnest. In Beirut, in the early and middle nineteen fifties, around the intellectual community of Jemaran, many notable Armenians take on his cause. Chief among them is Simon Vratsian, the principal of the school. Vartan becomes one of the unofficial secretaries of this honorable Armenian intellectual who was the last prime minister of the first Armenian Republic before Armenia fell into the clutches of the Soviet empire in 1920. Vartan reads and learns all he can get his hands on at Jemaran. In addition, he writes many of Vratsian's letters since Simon is almost blind by then. Vartan, through this experience, if nothing else, becomes groomed for academic administration since he is exposed to it at a very early age and in all its multiple facets of fund raising and community affairs and public relations and vision and rigor and all other aspects of pedagogy. Vartan, in need of a father figure, in need of people to believe in him and encourage him, finds many in Beirut and in Jemaran, all of which is delicately and precisely depicted in The Road to Home. He completes the entire venerable "Hayakidagan" (Armenology) course, reads voraciously, learns about life in the fast and wild town which Beirut was in the 1950s and graduates with honors ready to be shipped out to the West coast where he is accepted in Stanford. Le Petit Paris, as Beirut is referred to, makes a man out of him and a man hungry for knowledge.
The next fifth of the book is about his spectacular career at Stanford both as an undergraduate and graduate student. Again, his brilliance and remarkable attributes are detected by professors who become his champions for life! He is helped by these historians and scholars throughout his academic journey. They see a future for him he cannot even imagine and take it upon themselves to walk him through the steps to achieve greatness! Vartan is...
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I was born energetic" -- and how!, March 21, 2008
Vartan Gregorian has written a thoroughly fascinating book about his remarkable life and accomplishments. In this day and age a great deal of attention is paid to the "common man", as it well should be. But we tend to overlook the fact that it is the uncommon man that leads the way to advances in our culture. Vartan Gregorian is an compelling example of the remarkable talent nature only rarely incorporates into a human body, enabling startling results to be achieved.
From an unremarkable -- indeed, unpromising -- beginning, the child Vartan depended not on his family but on his grandmother and interested strangers to encourage his budding talents. His Armenian ancestors had fled to Iran from persecution and death in Turkey. His mother died when he was a young boy and his father and his stepmother were not close to him. But through a variety of fortuitous interventions he found his way from Iran to Stanford, where he earned his first academic degree.
At Stanford he married a remarkable woman who evidently shared his ability to adjust to new and challenging conditions. She had her first baby in Iran as Gregorian traveled in Afghanistan on a research grant. Then Gregorian began a dizzying ascent of academic activity that took him first to San Francisco State College, then to the University of Texas, and ultimately to the University of Pennsylvania where he became provost. His descriptions of academic politics -- the confoundedly complex interactions of presidents, deans, chancellors, and trustees -- are as fascinating as they are gut-twisting.
It was Gregorian's next move that put him on the public radar. He reluctantly became the head of New York City's Public Library. It was a decaying empire, having reached its peak in earlier decades but now floundering with insufficient scholastic vision and financial support. Gregorian proved to be just the man with the unusual abilities to turn things gloriously around. His vast scholarly knowledge, his enthusiasm and energy, his sense of humor, and his charisma brought in tens of millions of dollars from wealthy donors who were grateful that they had a cause to believe in, as well as a man in whom they could put their trust to use their money in a constructive way.
Gregorian's accomplishments continued unabated as he then moved into the presidency of Brown University, ultimately becoming the head of the Carnegie Foundation.
Here is a man of energy ("I was born energetic"), of vision, of knowledge, of acumen, of character, of superlative accomplishment. Here is a man to admire, to be inspired by. Here is the uncommon man who boosts culture upward.
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