Iran's Intellectuals, Going Underground

Though she barely arrives at Rouhani’s 2013 election in her epilogue, this delicate push-and-pull is similar to many situations described in Laura Secor’s new book on the Iranian reform movement, Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran. Secor, a magazine writer with intense experience and interest in Iran, reviews the history—namely, the origins of and tensions between the Islamic left and Islamic right—but the volume does so much more. The facts, of course, are all there: The book presents profiles and sometimes surprisingly intertwining narratives of a cast of characters who, though they have yet failed to win the soul of the country, formed the beating heart and main arteries of the Islamic left and later the reform movement. Over the top of these stories, however, Secor layers on a rich intellectual history.