THE STORY OF THE 1979 revolution in Iran has been told in so many ways by women in the last few years. There has been Azar Nafisi, with her story of a unique reading club in Reading Lolita in Tehran. There’s been Marjane Satrapi, with her graphic novel Persepolis. Nafisi used the retreating freedom to analyse the gradual onset of censorship to tell of life under the revolution. Satrapi’s was a child’s eye-view, focused on the curtailing of individual whims. Shirin Ebadi, the Tehran-based human rights lawyer who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, predictably takes a longer and more political view.

It is also a view from within. As Ebadi tracks the pre-1979 years, the eight subsequent years lost to the war with Iraq, the brutal crackdowns of the regime and thereafter the slow, and piece-meal, reclamation of civil rights and freedoms, her memoir comes laden with unresolved ques-tions. In that, in refusing to be wiser with hind-sight, she uses her life story to convey the turbu-lent history of her country.

It starts with early childhood memories of hearing her gentle grandmother reprimand her harshly for the first time. It was August 19, 1953, and news of the coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh had just been broad-cast, and liberal Iranians were aghast. That early American intervention—with Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit, directing assistance to the Shah—brought intimations of the political into the personal for young Shirin. Later, as she en-rolled in law school, she increasingly got drawn to the coffee-house culture of Tehran where pol-itics was intimately discussed. So even as she became a judge—one of the first women to be so inducted—in March 1970, she did not with-draw assistance to protests against the oppres-sion of the Shah’s regime.

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