In the preface to Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, journalist Laura Secor writes that Iranian lives during and after the 1979 revolution resembled, to her, "an epic novel, replete with calamities and reversals, crescendos and epiphanies." Children of Paradise is, in essence, about how Iranian people lived and thought through three decades of relentless tumult.
Secor's book is also a depiction of pre- and post-revolutionary Iranian philosophy, particularly a reformist strain of thought that evolved and persisted even during the Islamic Republic's most repressive years. Her protagonists are thinkers, mostly men, like Abdolkarim Soroush, who try to find a middle way between Western and Islamist thought. At times, Secor--who has written about Iran for publications such as the New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic and the New York Times Magazine--delves deeply into the intellectual weeds, following her protagonists as they adapt and promote the works of obscure Western philosophers, carefully building an ideological case against hardliners like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, a complex theory that places Iranian political entities under the "custodianship" of a single Islamic jurist.
Secor does not shy away from the violence that has plagued Iranian life, including the Iran-Iraq War and the horrific "chain murders"--politically motivated serial killings carried out by the Iranian security apparatus--but she emphasizes a narrative of ideological warfare carried out by professorial types like Soroush. She argues, persuasively, that the extremists Westerners see on television represent only a small fraction of Iranian life and philosophy. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books