Product Description

Beside the highway that leads south from Tehran, the necropolis of Ayatollah Rudollah Khomeini rises from the sweating tarmac like a miraculous filling station supplying fuel for the soul. However, the paint is peeling even before the complex has been completed, and the prayer halls are all but deserted.

Iran's Islamic Revolution is out of gas, but what has happened to the hostage takers, suicidal holy warriors, and ideologues who brought it about? These men and women kicked out the Shah, spent eight years fighting Saddam's Iraq, and terrified the West with its militancy and courage. Now they are a worn-out generation.

In this superbly crafted and thoughtful book, Christopher de Bellaigue gives us the voices and memories of these wistful revolutionaries. Mullahs and academics, artists, traders, and mystics: the author knows them as an insider -- a journalist who speaks fluent Persian and is married to an Iranian -- and also as an outsider -- a Westerner isolated in one of the world's most enigmatic and impenetrable societies.

The result is a subtly intense revelation of the hearts and minds of the Iranian people -- and what it is to live among them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #431265 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This portrait of the Islamist revolution's heartland is far from the "axis of evil" caricature so often associated with the regime that held Americans hostage in 1979–1980 and is actively pursuing nuclear arms today. Rather, Ballaigue, who covers Iran for the Economist, presents a textured view of a complex society, struggling with an ancient culture, a radical ideology and a Westernized elite. Drawing inspiration from George Orwell, who chronicled the Catalonian revolution of the 1930s and its betrayal by Stalinists, Ballaiguecharts the Islamist revolution from its origins in the repressive regime of the Shah and the fiery sermons of the Ayatollah Khomeini, through its triumph and the taking of the hostages of the "Great Satan," the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal and the waning of the Islamist revolutionary fervor as educated Iranians became disillusioned with the mullahs and thirsted for greater cultural and intellectual freedom. The book is peppered with interviews with and vignettes of the many Iranians the author has met during his years in Iran; the title refers to a cemetery in Tehran where the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war are interred—"rose garden" being an ironic rendition of rows of headstones. (On sale Jan. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
If Pollack's Persian Puzzle [BKL D 1 04] is the policy wonk's view of today's Iran, British journalist de Bellaigue's memoir is closer to the ground. Outsiders might see Iran as an emerging nuclear threat, but de Bellaigue also sees a country terribly spent from decades of autocratic rule, revolution, ultrafundamentalism, a ruinous war with Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal, and ongoing hostilities with America. The author, who lives in Iran and writes for the New York Review of Books and the economist, discusses these issues at length, but he also guides us through city streets and into the lives of Iranian citizens. There is Mr. Zarif, who agitated for the Ayatollah's return to Iran and now wonders why his Iranian-manufactured Paykan car is so poorly built. And the war veteran Amini, whose forehead carries 60 pieces of shrapnel and who has resigned himself to letting Esfahan teens dance in public. Readers will find here a detailed picture of Iranian life that has too long been out of reach. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A highly original and disturbing portrait of the Islamic republic." (BusinessWeek )

"Readers will find here a detailed picture of Iranian life that has too long been out of reach." (Booklist )

"Incisive analysis. . . . Through eloquent human stories, Bellaigue frames the murky politics of Iran in a telling, intimate scale." (Newsweek (International Edition) )

"De Bellaigue gives us a sense of daily life in Iran . . . cynical, conflicted, and bitter, yet surprisingly vibrant." (Chronicle of Higher Education )

"De Bellaigue is a defiantly literary writer, and he gives us a sense of Tehran [that is] immediate and insistent." (Pico Iyer, New York Times Book Review )

"De Bellaigue's . . . anecdotes and interviews provide tremendously valuable context for many of today's headlines." (Washington Post Book World )

"An important book that deserves to be read by both defenders and detractors of the Islamic republic." (Times Literary Supplement )

"An intimate exploration of the revolution's denouement...The intellectual honesty de Bellaigue brings to bear is worthy of praise." (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review )