The Lonely War

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