The Lonely War

A survey of post-revolution Iranian history, grafted onto the bio of an upper-middle class girl growing up to become the NYT's (only?) journalist on the ground in Tehran. Moral(s) of the story: Iranian society is a lot more nuanced than is regularly portrayed; being a journalist is soooo baller.

So I read this after Emily Bazelon suggested it on the wonderful Political Gabfest. Emily RAVED about it, but my feelings are more “OK, that was strong-ish!” with a side of meh. It was good, sure. The tale of Iran is a deeply interesting one. I had recurring visions of A Separation, one of the most brilliant films ever and a wonderfully rich, humanizing look at classism and domestic strife in modern Iran. Iran tends to get caricatured in American culture (“the great Satan” and all that, oh dear), so it's always nice to get some primary docs from the inside.

But this book? I think my problem was that the writing often went a little flat, and was structured along the lines of: [event from my life] - [long-ish digression explaining a detail about Iranian politics/history/culture] - [incorporating that detail into the next thing that happened in my life] - [next event from my life]. So there was tons of really interesting stuff happening, and I learned a lot and was often deeply moved, but I just had trouble with the narrative structure. It kept throwin' me!