Overview

A memoir of life in Iran in the tumultuous years leading up to the 1979 revolution'Offers an intimate window onto the Iranian revolution just when we need to be thinking about it the most' - Marjane Satrapi, writer and film director Recounts the political contests between Islamists, leftists, and others culminating in one of the twentieth century's most surprising revolutions Combines the sensitivity of a memoir with the expertise of a scholarly study to explore lesser-known figures and events in the Iranian revolution's history Shifts the center of Iran's revolutionary history away from its capital to its provinces in an attempt to show how the global and local interacted at multiple levels In October 1978, a day that started like any other for Ali Mirsepassi full of anti-Shah protests ended in near death. He was stabbed and dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of Tehran for having spoken against Khomeini. In this book, Mirsepassi digs up this and other painful memories to ask: How did the Iranian revolutionary movement come to this? How did a people united in solidarity and struggle end up so divided? In this first-hand account, Mirsepassi deftly weaves together his insights as a sociologist of Iran with his memories of provincial life and radical activism in 1960s and 1970s Iran. Attentive to the everyday struggles Iranians faced as they searched for ways to learn about and make history despite state surveillance and censorship, The Loneliest Revolution revisits questions of leftist failure and Islamist victory and ultimately asks us all to probe the memories, personal and collective, that we leave unspoken.

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9781399511414

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Reviews

"""The prose of our historiography is changing. Solid scholars with an impeccable academic background are turning to the more publicly accessible genre of memoir, and Ali Mirsepassi's exceptionally insightful new book is a vintage of such fruitful prose. Deeply erudite, and yet intimate, endearing, and irresistibly readable, The Loneliest Revolution charts a whole new way of writing history. A bravura performance! ?"" -Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University"

Author Information

Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He is Director of Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU. Mirsepassi was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar and is the co-editor, with Arshin Adib-Moghadam, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press. His recent books include, The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan (Stanford University Press, Fall 2021); and Iran's Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State (October 2019, Cambridge University Press).

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