The Lonely War

Abstract

Nazila Fathi’s The Lonely War joins a number of similar journalist memoirs by Iranian or Iranian émigrés, including Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds (Harper Collins: 2010), Ramita Navai’s City of Lies (Public Affairs: 2014), and Maziar Bahari’s Then They Came for Me (Random House: 2011), which was recently reissued as Rosewater and adapted into a film by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Fathi and Bahari mostly grew up in Iran, whereas Azadeh Moaveni and Roya Hakakian mostly grew up in the United States. Thus they offer a different sort of history, one that is less inclined toward nostalgia or narratives of leaving and return. As a proverbial first draft of history, Fathi’s memoir appeals to a wide audience interested in current affairs, but also to policy wonks in both the media and politics. Fellow journalists seem captivated by such stories, particularly when they involve the author’s attempts to analyze civil society in the Islamic Republic. Fathi’s work will also appeal to Iranians in the diaspora, others interested in the Shi‘ah polity’s internal problems, and those concerned with questions of social class in addition to gender in the Islamic Republic ...