Rating: 
Summary: Simply, not true.................
Review: What more can you expect from a person who doesn't even believe in GOD? I have been to Iran on a one month trip, and to the school she's talking about in her book, since I am an English Professor, and have found that she has made all this up.
I'm very disappointed to see such great imagination used in such a disgusting way, in order to step on her own country, with her own feet!
Just like Jesus, I can only pray that GOD forgives her..........
Rating: 
Summary: fantastic
Review: This is a fantastically well written memoir. I am a fan of memoirs, enjoying the truth more than I do the fatasy. This book is above and beyond what i expected. The courage that was faced through all the terrible ordeals is astounding. If you read this book for any reason do it for the fact that you will come away with the feeling that anyone can come out of the shadows in to the light with the strength and determination and the courage of a lion. Excellent,Excellent book! Other corageous books to look for (Memoirs) Nightmares Echo, My Fractured Life, Secret Life of Bees, Running With Scissors
Rating: 
Summary: In need of serious editing
Review: I wanted so much to like this book. A book about life in Iran in the 1980s written by a woman, a literature professor, sounds fascinating. I was surprised to find that this book isn't very well written. Most of the dialogue and descriptions of the "girls" are just painful and the tone of the book is patronizing. I couldn't help wincing every time she used the term "my girls" and called her friend "my magician." The academic analysis is repetitive and doesn't go very far (almost embarrassingly so), and, unfortunately, we don't learn that much about the author's students or other people around her. The discussions of James, Nabokov and Austen simply reminded me that I could be spending my time reading something much better and more fun.
Rating: 
Summary: Too many agendas
Review: My book club was diappointed with this one. Nafisi seems to have too many agendas, and the result is a disorganized, less-than-engaging book. The first, and most interesting, agenda is the story of the women in Nafisi's discussion group and how each experiences Iran under an oppressive regime. This is the part of the story that we were most interested in, but there wasn't enough of it. In the middle 2/3 of the book, the interesting girls were absent. The second agenda was political/historical. We expected this, and were interested in it, but Nafisi's presentation of the political context was too focused on _herself_, and that approach didn't work for us. It didn't stimulate us to learn more about Iran the way other memoirs have prompted us to learn more about, for example, the cultural revolution in China or forced integration in Little Rock. The third agenda was literary criticism. This was not what we expected, and none of us enjoyed this quasi-academic angle. The three agendas didn't weave together well. One of our members said "I think she (Nafisi) should re-write it; it could be really good!" but most of us were just frustrated. On a positive note, we found a great Persian restaurant for our discussion!
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Too much of Lit 101 and not enough about how these women really lived their day to day lives. For example, I wanted to know how the author manages to meet the man she calls "the magician" in public when such meetings between unrelated men and women are punishable by torture - perhaps death. How did she justify this to her husband and family? Was the danger not really so great? Did she time her meetings to avoid discovery? Was that possible? So many unanswered questions that would have been so much more interesting than exploring The Great Gatsby -- once again. I found myself slogging through the final third. Nothing's going on and the author is holding back - alot. (Either that or she was a terrible observer.) Her relationship with her readers is superficial, without the level of intimacy and truthfulness that would have made you feel, well - anything. There's so much more she could have shared that would have made for compelling reading. The potential for a really great book is there -- making this all the more disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: Oh, my! What a great book! Very interesting reading! See for yourself, buy the book.
Rating:
Summary: evocative writing
Review: A veritable delight. An evocative memoir with plenty of flavor. The book loses some of its tautness in the later half, especially when the author starts discussing Jane Austen.
Rating:
Summary: What's the hype about?
Review: This could have been a truly excellent book, given its setting (the early days of the Iranian Revolution) and its author (an intelligent and independent Iranian woman); instead, it is meandering, repetitive, coy, and self-indulgent - one hopes the author isn't quite so woolly-minded when delivering lectures to her literature classes at Johns Hopkins. The observations she makes about the sympathy the character Lolita engenders in a reader are so commonplace as to be rather embarrassing. Many of Nafisi's own attempts at description of the cast of characters in her own life depend on hackneyed physiognomy and well-worn cliche'. If I had to hear about one more cup of coffee or pastry, I'd have committed a cliche' of my own. When one reads her in the context of Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, Flaubert, and the authors of the other books she and her clandestine group discusses, her prose suffers markedly by comparison. To her credit, Nafisi has gone through a horrifying moment in world history & displayed considerable courage, but the most courageous thing she might have done after having finished writing this book would have been to get a good editor to reorganize it, trim the fat, thus giving it some philosophical heft. Reading great works of literature may be a necessary, but is not a sufficient condition for writing about them. Living through history is likewise not a sufficient condition for writing compelling autobiography.
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious But Important
Review: The style of this book reminds me of Nabokov's "Speak Memory". The subject of this book is in large part about the life and times of a woman in an emerging Islamic theocracy (with touches of discourse on the four featured literary areas: Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Henry James, and Austin). It is presented in a disjointed, piecemeal fashion making it quite hard to walk away with an integrated representation of the intended messages. And yet, there are a lot of interesting and even important revelations about what it was like to be a woman in an emerging Islamic theocracy. I would recommend this book to those with sufficient patience and a strong interest in the Iranian theocracy and/or women in the theocracy.
Rating:
Summary: Too Understated to Confront the Problem of Islam
Review: Having lived in Iran before, during and just after the Islamic Revolution, I felt that Ms. Nafisi understated the problem. Khomeini was a despicable madman who declared himself the infallible Supreme Leader. He also called himself an Imam, although he had no religious or historical right to that title. He's been succeeded by Khatamei, another madman. While you may say they have perverted Islam, they represent Shiite Islam in Iran. They are head of the Iranian Shiites, but they are not recognized by Sunnis or Shiites in other parts of the Middle East. Islam, as practiced by these despots, is the real problem in Iran. Iran has had two corrupt governments run by despots in the past 25 years. First a corrupt "constitutional" monarchy and now an even more corrupt Islamic "Republic." There is no separation of Church and State, and Iran desperately needs this. Corrupt clerics veto parliamentary law. Iran has no separation of executive, legilative, or judicial branches of government. The judicial system is one of the most corrupt in the world. Only a government based on a sound constitution will protect the civil liberties of women in Iran. The founding fathers of the USA were wise when they drafted the US constitution. Iran should take a lesson.
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