logoalt Hacker News

p-e-wtoday at 1:53 PM3 repliesview on HN

At least to the kind of Iranians who were sending their children to French schools, yes.

But of course the other kind of people very rarely have someone writing international bestsellers on their behalf, so this is all we’ll get.


Replies

kranke155today at 5:54 PM

And ? the author couldn't have written it from the pov of someone else. youre asking someone to do something that cant be done, and then blaming them for not doing it ?

show 1 reply
ndiddytoday at 3:55 PM

I think it's a very well written personal memoir that shows what the revolution felt like to someone growing up in the Iranian urban upper class. It portrays the revolution as there being a hope for change, prior to religious men with beards and guns inexplicably showing up because that's what did happen from her perspective. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with this. The revolution was split between college-educated urban secular leftists and a much larger portion of religious conservatives, and the latter eclipsed the former so quickly that her viewpoint is probably legitimately what it looked like for her and her family. It doesn't try to do any political analysis of what motivated the Islamists or why they gained power because it's her personal story, it's not trying to be some sort of objective history of the Iranian revolution. I think it does what it set out to do very well, and it's an excellent story of the tragedy of just trading one oppressive dictatorship for another.

show 1 reply
draw_downtoday at 2:23 PM

[dead]