Children Of Paradise: The Struggle For The Soul Of Iran

Description

“Deeply moving…A first-rate, highly readable intellectual history.” –The Wall Street Journal The drama that shaped today’s Iran, from the Revolution to the present day. In 1979, seemingly overnight—moving at a clip some thirty years faster than the rest of the world—Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have imagined and reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East and have acted upon their beliefs with urgency and passion, frequently staking their lives for them. With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching, and writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing and wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich and often tragic history. Essential reading at this moment when the fates of our countries have never been more entwined, Children of Paradise will stand as a classic of political reporting; an indelible portrait of a nation and its people striving for change.

About the Author

Laura Secor is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, and other publications. She has served as a staff editor for the New York Times Op-Ed page, a reporter for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, and as acting executive editor of the American Prospect. She was an editor and writer for Lingua Franca magazine from 1997-2001. She was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin both in the fall 2009 and spring 2013.(fromhttp://journalism.nyu.edu/about-us/pr...)