Lipstick Jihad
Azadeh Moaveni
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586481932

A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America & American in Iran.

As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity. In suburban California, she lived in two worlds: at home she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition & dreaming of Tehran.

Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga & listened to Madonna. For years she ignored the tense standoff between her two cultures until she got to college when the clash between Iranian & American policies magnified her discomfort.

As a journalist, Azadeh Moaveni returns to Iran in search of her identity during the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets, shouting for the end of the oppressive Islamic regime. She struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron & torquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination.

Lipstick Jihad, for all its shallow implications, is a deeply disturbing, astonishingly enlightening & unflinching look into a world gone crazy, when the young people of Tehran are desperate for change, not unlike the 1960s in America, exploring free expression, drugs & forbidden hedonism, often with tragic results.

The old saying: “you can never go home” is fully realized as Azadeh Moaveni struggles with her dreams, memories & sense of loyalty in a very different world, where she clashes, as a free, modern American woman, with the violence of a moralistic, past-obsessed male-dominated society.

What a time it was!
(05/08/05)

Rebecca