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Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran. Roxanne Varzi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 290 pp.
This ambitious book portrays the culture of Iran in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, especially as lived and expressed by the generation born since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. The author seeks to show interconnections between phenomena as diverse as classical Sufi literature; 20th-century Iranian intellectual trends; images and film promoting the goals of the Islamic Republic; memoirs and testimonials by Iranian soldiers of the 1980s war with Iraq; reflections of now-mature veterans of that war; secular, urban, middle-class youths' behavior in public and in private; youths' reflections on their behavior; and the political reform movement of the late 1990s. The format intersperses discussions of philosophical and analytical concepts from Iranian and Western intellectual traditions with excerpts from the author's diary and field notes; entries from the journals of college students; fictionalized stories and vignettes involving characters and events the author invented ("within historic and ethnographic facts based on my research," p. 16); and summaries of classical Persian literature and contemporary Iranian films.
The book is based on two related projects. The...