Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran : Secor, Laura: Amazon.com.au: Books

Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran : Secor, Laura: Amazon.com.au: Books







Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran
by Laura Secor (Author) Format: Paperback
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars (64)

"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.
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Review

Named a Must-Read by Flavorwire

"Could not be more timely. ... Indelibly portrays the journalists, dissidents, reformers and student activists who have fought bravely for their ideals in a country where voicing one's beliefs has often led to imprisonment, torture and death. ... Secor's portraits create an impressionistic montage of Iranian life during the last 37 years, which is hugely valuable in helping us understand Iran's complex back story. ... They provide sharp, pinhole windows into a country that for many years has seemed, in her words, like 'a black box whose contents were all but unknowable.' --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A deeply moving, intimate collection of personal stories...[Secor gives], through extensive interviews with Iranians in the country and in exile, a first-rate, highly readable intellectual history...Ms. Secor is at her very best when she relays the bravery and despair of dissidents, in particular the agony of women who have thrown themselves into the fight...Ms. Secor last visited Iran in 2012. We can hope that she isn't denied a visa in the future for her truth-telling. If she is, Children of Paradise was worth the price." --Wall Street Journal

"Democracy is always a work in progress. This point is made crystal clear in journalist Laura Secor's exhaustively researched book ... an insightful view of the evolving intellectual character of a nation that has been largely hidden from us for forty years. ... A stellar example of investigative journalism and narrative nonfiction." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Entrancing...In [Secor's] hands, clerics, scholars, and others who helped Iran morph into a republic where mosque and state are inseparable are like larger-than-life character from an epic novel...If beginning to know a people, a country, can help further our appreciation of them, [Children of Paradise is] an important building block." --O, the Oprah Magazine

"Mesmerizing...Secor captures the extraordinary intellectual and political ferment of a country where millions of people chafe under authoritarian rule...substantive and deeply affecting."--Newsday

"A vibrant panorama of contemporary Iran that doubles as a thorough intellectual and political history of the country's past four decades...highly accessible." --Foreign Affairs

"Americans ... might take this moment to enjoy Secor's book to gain a better understanding of Iran's rich recent history. In it, they will find this lesson: the circle may tighten around intellectual life in Iran, around political progress, and around the complicated heroes who hold down, often unsuccessfully, those barricades--but the ideas that animate these figures and their impulses, the debates behind them, will live on underground, behind closed doors, until it's time to bloom again. Secor's story ... is a refreshingly Iranian tale--but for us there is this implicit warning: Do not trample this soil and foreclose that next Spring." --The New Republic

"A thrilling introduction to Iranian culture and the daring intellectuals who have crafted ideological challenges to the rulers of the Islamic Republic." --Shelf Awareness

"Thoughtful political history [that] comprehensive[ly] engage[s] with the social and intellectual complexities that shaped the creation of this modern-day religious state... In visceral detail, Secor describes the political lurches and turns of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the country's transformation from autocratic fiefdom to a theocratic "democracy."... Children of Paradise works particularly well because it reaches beyond the documentation of Iran's turbulent recent history, and succeeds in personifying it." --Haaretz

"[Children of Paradise] covers a wide array of people, from political thinkers to reformers to revolutionaries, and provides fascinating glimpses and insights into a number of conflicts within Iran, as well as exploring the ideological debates behind them--ones which may have previously made little sense to many Western observers." --Signature Reads

"Secor's book, which peers inside the 'black box' of a complex theocratic regime over the course of decades, will likely provide grist for arguments on more than one side." --Flavorwire

"Revealing [and] often shocking... An insightful chronicle of bloody repression and brave defiance." --Kirkus Reviews

"This immersive intellectual history... offers a firm grounding in the last 40 years of Iranian political thought and the many actions it has inspired in a complicated and fascinating country." --Publishers Weekly

"An essential read [that] will help to shed light on the dreams, hardships, and changing views of the individuals who have helped to impact the direction of a nation...highly recommended." --Library Journal

"Anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping post-revolutionary Iran will be rewarded by this intimate and intellectually thrilling portrait. It's a towering accomplishment."

--Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Thirteen Days in September

"Transcending the political clichés that are often offered as new insights on Iran, this wonderful and timely book provides a glimpse into what Secor calls the 'soul of the matter.' For once the focus is not on the rulers but on those who, with anguish and determination, tried to bring about political change--even as they themselves were transformed--and their desire, above all, to restore and preserve their country's sense of dignity, and their own."

--Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Republic of Imagination

"Anyone who ever thought of Iran as a monolith must read Children of Paradise, which takes the reader far behind its fearsome caricature. The children referred to in the title are the brilliant dreamers behind the transformative ideology that produced today's Iran. This is a meticulously reported intellectual history, but much more. Secor doesn't flinch from depicting the cruelty of the revolutionary republic, but throughout, it is the passion and promise of the people that shines through."

--Barbara Demick, author of the National Book Award finalist Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

About the Author

Laura Secor has written about Iran for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, and other publications, and has worked at The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The American Prospect, and Lingua Franca. She has been a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin, and has taught journalism at NYU and Princeton. Secor lives in Brooklyn.

From the Hardcover edition.

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From other countries

Bikerguy

5.0 out of 5 stars Secor's history is a history of ideas of liberal Iranian historical figures, and the murderous habits of Iranian theocrats

Reviewed in the United States on 29 February 2016

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

As I finish reading Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor, Iran is conducting parliamentary elections and has concluded a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Laura Secor’s history of Iran from before the the 1979 Islamic Revolution arrives just in time for US Readers to understand this moment in time for Iran. My hope is that Secor’s history will help those of us in the US to move beyond the fearful reflex we have in the US about everything Iranian, and replace it with a historical understanding. Certainly there is reason to be fearful of Iran because of the autocratic violence described in this book directed by the Iranian government against it’s own young, and what we would consider Iranian patriots. However, understanding comes from an understanding of history. Laura Secor begins there, with history. one might call hers a history of ideas, more than a history of events.

A US reader approaching this history might anticipate an authoritative chronological account of the overthrow of Mossadegh, the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi and the SAVAK secret police, the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Occupation of the American Embassy, the Iran-Iraq War and the continuation of the theocratic Islamic government to the present day. While Secor writes about all those events, she tells the story of these events through people. Many chapters in her book begin with the introduction of an important person in Iranian History. Samad Behrangi was the author of a children’s story, “The Little Black Fish” in 1968. Shariati, an Islamic scholar, also wrote poetry, actually studied in France and brought Marxism and existentialism to Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader that Shariati probably pointed to a need for. Others were Alireza Haghigi, Mostafa Rohsefat, Bani-Sadr, Beheshdi, Rafsanjani, Mousavi, Ali Khameni, Akbar Ganji, Khatami, Shahram Rafizadeh and Ali Afshari.

Through these characters who appear and reappear in the historical narrative she describes the blend of Western ideas and Iranian Shiism that struggle for the soul of Iran. The third section of the chapter on Revoilution entitled, The Period of Constant Contemplation, is key to understanding all the underlying tensions in Islamic thought in Iran. It is well worth the slog through philosophy through which Laura Secor leads us.

Secor also relies on Crane Brinton and Hannah Arendt’s historical study of the historical similarities in societal revolutions to explain how the Iranian Revolution follows a historical “pattern” in so many ways.

I commend Laura Secor’s history to your careful reading. Despite the slog of philosophy in “The Period of Contemplation”, there are stories such as told of Ali Afshari that are personal and tragic. There is the accounting of the days of the overthrow of the Shah in which many people died. The many executions ordered at Evin Prison by Khomeini near the end of his life, and the Iranian security apparatus’ Chain Murders are horrific.

May you gain some understanding why and how we have arrived at this point in Iranian history. There are hopeful signs in the successful negotiation of the nuclear treaty, and the new elections. However, Secor describes it as a struggle of the soul of Iran. Nothing is assured.

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Amazon Customer

4.0 out of 5 stars ... agree with all of the content but its a good book to read

Reviewed in Canada on 24 March 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Although I don't agree with all of the content but its a good book to read.

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Hal Fonts

4.0 out of 5 stars The Iran I loved but never knew.

Reviewed in the United States on 27 March 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Over 500 pages, 465 Notes, 6-page Selected Bibliography, 5 trips to Iran between 2004 and 2012, interviews with more than 160 Iranians; "Children of Paradise" is encyclopedic with information -- yet it reads like a compelling personal novel of adventure and discovery.

For a Peace Corps Rural Public Works Engineer, in the late 1960s Iran was a stable time of intense exciting development under the (secular Muslim, benevolent-Dictator) Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Then home in the US a decade later, I watched confused as it all came apart. First the Shah dying of cancer, abdicating in 1978-79; the 1980 Embassy hostage crisis; and then the aberrational theocratic rule of the Islamic Republic. And now, periods of hostile demonization between US and Iranian leadership roles in the Mid-East.

Such complexity in the ancient, rich and diversely tolerant multi-cultural country and culture that I had come to know (I thought) and love while working, traveling and living there. I'm looking forward to completing Children of Paradise, and filling in more of Iran's and my own complex history.

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David N. Olson

5.0 out of 5 stars Decades long struggle told through the personal stories of people of courage.

Reviewed in the United States on 6 February 2018

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

This was the best book I've read in months. It worked its way through all of the complicated developments in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, but it never felt dry or dull. It was incredible to read of wave after wave of independent thinkers who arose in Iran. These people, both men and women, were not revolutionaries against the Islamic regime, but they wanted to see certain injustices corrected. While tolerated for a time, all of them eventually ran afoul of the most hard line elements in Iran. These people, who operated pretty much without any restraint from the formal government arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and sometimes killed people whose only crime was to speak their minds.

Reading about the courage and clear thinking of these people felt like a kind of spiritual cleansing. The book also contains an extensive list of further resources to read, from which I intend to glean some future additions to my reading list.

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Amazon Customer

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written account of Iran's search for its modern identity in the post Mossadegh and post Shah era.

Reviewed in the United States on 26 June 2016

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As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Iran for three years and a professional higher ed planner for universities in Iran, Laura Secor's book rings very true to the cultural fine points and understanding and appreciation of Iran that I know. The larger issues of political and cultural wars that haveo been raging to define a modern society that is true to Iran's history and culture are so beautifully written that it is a pleasure to read through the dense narrative full of unfamiliar names, complex political movements, and ironically deep connections to western philosophers. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the real Iran that is not the Iran of a few well known leaders who have been easy to dismiss or mischarscterize in the western press.

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P. O'Neil

5.0 out of 5 stars Easily the best book on the revolution and its decay

Reviewed in the United States on 22 February 2017

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It's hard to find a thoughtful and complex book about Iran that is neither a travelogue akin to the "Behind the Iron Curtain" works of the 1970s and 1980s on communist countries or laborious descriptions of every event that has taken place over the past 30 or 3000 years (see: Axworthy, Buchan). Secor uses personal accounts, ideas, and conflicts to bring out the tensions in the Islamic Republic--some unique to Iranian politics, others a function of revolutionary battles everywhere. It's a challenging read, especially at the start, but the reader will find it to be the best book on Iran since Abrahamian's History of Modern Iran. Indeed, they are great companions. If you are interested in Iranian politics, in political ideology, in the tension between radicalism and liberalism, this is an essential read.

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Amazon Customer

4.0 out of 5 stars Good, informative read

Reviewed in the United States on 5 September 2016

Verified Purchase

Well written and interesting. Slightly slow but it's a lot of information to get through in order to understand all the background and foundation on how Iran and its philosophers cultivated politics.

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Kindle Customer

3.0 out of 5 stars Good

Reviewed in the United States on 8 September 2018

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

The first couple chapters were a struggle to get through and very heavy on philosophy, but as the author but her stride it got more interesting.

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Sojourner

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant work.

Reviewed in the United States on 20 May 2016

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Secor's range of knowledge is mind blogging. Kudos to her. Not for anyone looking for cliches and skin deep analysis. Brilliant work.

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Bill Moore

4.0 out of 5 stars Insights into Modern Day Iran

Reviewed in the United States on 7 March 2018

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About 25% through it. Enjoyable insight into the philosophical underpinnings of modern Iran and its struggles to find its own identity.

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JAC

4.0 out of 5 stars Iran is a horrible place to live if you don't practice what the state religion desuires.

Reviewed in the United States on 9 July 2016

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Thankfully we don't have a state religion. Some of the people have amazing courage.

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Kevin Cuthbert

5.0 out of 5 stars Just Read It

Reviewed in the United States on 9 February 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

If you've any curiosity at all about Iran you should read this book. It is incredibly well written. And there are some striking comparisons to what is going on in our own country right now.

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Max

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book about the social forces at work in Iran ...

Reviewed in the United States on 4 April 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

A great book about the social forces at work in Iran during prior 40 years viewed from a number of different perspective. One of the few book that I find worth re-reading.

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Melchior Thompson

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent presentation of trends and factions in Iranian society from ...

Reviewed in the United States on 3 March 2016

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An excellent presentation of trends and factions in Iranian society from time of shah to nearly present day. Particularly interesting in view of recent Iranian elections.

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Stuart B. Rich

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant and eloquent book

Reviewed in the United States on 28 September 2016

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A chance to acquaint oneself with amazing people, full of courage and hope! Secor's impassioned accounts are unforgettable.

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Amazon Customer

1.0 out of 5 stars One Star

Reviewed in the United States on 15 March 2016

Verified Purchase

This is a looooong book- you'll feel like an embassy hostage!

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Murray H. Siegel

1.0 out of 5 stars Thedre must be a better book on Iran

Reviewed in the United States on 8 June 2018

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

more about philosophy than history or politics

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Mrs. Arbuckle

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended.

Reviewed in the United States on 3 March 2017

Format: KindleVerified Purchase

Thank you, Laura, for a beautifully written and extremely pertinent book.

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Sidney

5.0 out of 5 stars Remembering

Reviewed in the United States on 17 March 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Very moving for me, for personal reasons.

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