My Name Is Iran: A Memoir (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I took my first steps amid the ancient ruins and oil fields of Solomon's Mosque in Iran..." (more)
Key Phrases: New Mexico, Abol Ghassem, Reza Shah (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ardalan, senior producer at NPR's Morning Edition, records in wooden bits and pieces the history of her Iranian family, both into and out of America. Ardalan (her given first name is Iran) is the granddaughter of an enterprising Bakhtiari tribesman who attended the American mission school in Tehran and graduated from Syracuse Medical School in 1926 at age 54; together with Ardalan's grandmother, an adventurous American nurse from Idaho, they moved to Iran to start both a hospital and a family of seven children. Ardalan, born in San Francisco in 1964, grew up largely in Iran (her father was a Kurdish architect, and her mother a writer and translator). In 1980 she returned to America, where she adopted her middle name to avoid censure, but three years later, in the most arresting segment of the memoir, Ardalan recounts her return to Tehran at age 18 to accept an arranged marriage and become a Shiite Muslim. Eventually she attended journalism school in New Mexico, endured two divorces and had four children over the years of building her career. While her prose is plain, Ardalan's testimony to the feminist spirit of the pioneering women in her family, and in the face of centuries-long strictures against the advancement of women, is a supreme achievement. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

NPR producer Ardalan's parents, "hippie intellectuals" who wanted to "experience their heritage," moved to a small town in Iran when she was an infant. Her mother's father was born in Tehran; her father was a Harvard-educated Iranian architect, and Ardalan recalls the family's happy years in Tehran in the 1960s and early 1970s. But by 1976, philosophical differences led to her parents' divorce, and by the fall of 1978, the country was "headed into chaos." Ardalan finishes high school in America, but feeling vulnerable and alone, she flies back to revolutionary Iran. She delves into her Islamic heritage and, surprisingly, enters into an arranged marriage at age 18. She works for an English news program at an Iranian radio station, the first job leading eventually to her distinguished career at NPR, finally returning to the U.S. in 1987. In telling the story of three generations of women who circled back and forth between Iran and America, Ardalan perceptively draws parallels between "the dichotomy of free will versus destiny" in her family with that in Iran itself. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805079203
• ISBN-13: 978-0805079203
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #785,267 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I wish I had liked it, February 14, 2007

By	errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrin (Portland) - See all my reviews

I fell in love with "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and nearly ran to Powell's to buy this book when I heard an NPR interview with the author. I thought to myself, "fantastic! someone torn between both cultures that can provide insights into the US and Iran as an insider and an outsider!" Right?

I read over the first few pages, standing in the bookstore aisle, and thought to myself, "perhaps this matter-of-fact style will transform to a narrative style in subsequent chapters" and bought the book for $24.99. It didn't. Every major event in this book is framed in the most simplistic terms, often without explanation. It's almost as though the author has a grocery list that she's checking off next to her computer as she's typing. "I returned Iran. I married a strange man. It was different. Life was good. I cooked chicken. He didn't believe I could cook chicken. I had a baby. Then, life wasn't so good. Then, we moved to America. I had another baby. Things were okay in America. Then, my husband left." Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration, but I couldn't agree more with the New York Times opinion:

"By turns fascinating and frustrating, Ms. Ardalan's memoir is a case study of a book in desperate need of an editor. While compelling portraits of relatives are left curiously truncated and incomplete, the volume is padded with clumsily written, New Agey asides that should have been left on the cutting-room floor."

Where are the editors? Who published this book? There is a lovely story lurking somewhere beneath the awkward writing. The lack of editing is criminal.

The story, however, was quite engaging. Initially, I picked up this book with great anticipation. By the third or fourth sitting, I began to dread the simplistic prose and mockingly read aloud particularly poor passages to my husband. The story barely kept me engaged through the end. Because I empathize with the author, I'm hesitant to blame her here. I think she has a fascinating life and could have written a terribly interesting book.

Sooo, caveat lector, it's a good story, but poorly, poorly written. I'd be interested to see if the publisher couldn't completely republish the book. Does this ever happen?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vanity Book, October 12, 2007

By	Sally Star "StarLite" (Florida) - See all my reviews

This book is poorly edited, and not very effective. The author's story is not that fantastic that it can stand on it's own, and as a producer for NPR, she's just not that interesting. She spends so much time tip toeing around anything that might cast her family in a bad light, that the book feels half baked.
Yes, she went back and forth from Iran a couple of times and had a couple of bad marriages, but so what? She should have written the book about any single one of her ancestors, each of which had a more interesting life than she did.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars average , March 26, 2008

By	malita "mali" (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Name Is Iran: A Memoir (Paperback)

Iran has a story to tell, story of a young woman coming to understand who she is and within that context I appreciated the book. I did not care for her need to name drop on so much of the book to establish her identity. At some point in the book Iran feels the need to mention that the grand father of the neighbor of her niece was someone important in US Navy and somehow unsuccessfully she tries to establish a link from there to her present partner. Some of these kinds of name dropping and her need to mention them seem completely out of place and takes away from her story. Over all it is an average book.