This is an excellent memoir by an Iranian woman from an academic and politically important family. It is a grippingly honest account of her family life and the political struggle within Iran. On the one hand your heart goes out to the pains suffered by this family from a mentally unstable mother and father whose position as mayor of Tehran resulted in his imprisonment for three years because of political intrigues by competitors who wanted to pull him down.
I had previously read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and enjoyed it for the glimpse it gave me into her life and her personal struggle with the theocracy that calls itself the "Islamic Republic" of Iran. That book was a wonderful blend of personal story, literature, and contemporary Iran and its suppression of women. This book cuts much deeper. It is more personal. It is more bittersweet in its brutal honesty about this family that stumbles along with a dysfunctional mother and a father who eventually divorces and leaves.
If you want to have a good understanding of the complex reality of Iranian politics, this is an excellent book. She talks about the Qahar dynasty (to which she is related) that gave way to the Pahlavi dynastry where the father got too close to Hitler so the Allies deposed him in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who, in turn, was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini.
She freely admits that she was a student radical who happily worked to depose the Shah and thought that the religious fundamentalists led by Khomeini could be "managed". (As I read this I thought of the same mistake that the German democratic parties indulged in when they believed that they could promote Hitler to Chancellor while still "managing" him. In both cases, the truth is that the fanatic easily defeated the democratic opposition.)
This is an excellent book that should be read. I highly recommend it.
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