To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America Book

The daughter of an American singer and an Iranian architect does justice to both her heritages in this thoughtful memoir. Tara Bahrampour spent most of her childhood in Tehran, but in 1979 she fled from there with her family as the unfolding Islamic revolution made Iran unsafe for anyone with Western ties. While her parents struggled to make a living in the U.S., Bahrampour worked on becoming an American teenager, though she still felt strong ties to the warm, communal world she left behind. Returning for a visit in 1994, Bahrampour found a nation too complex to be properly described by political stereotypes--a transitional society where her female relatives slept in lacy negligees and watched illegal American videos, but also drove around with a tape of Khomeini's speeches in their car's cassette player. During her stay, despite some scary encounters with hostile officials, Bahrampour rediscovered a continuity she could never find anywhere else--the links to kin and to history that are alive in the Iranian landscape. This rootedness, she accepts, will never be hers as an Iranian American, yet her thoughtful examination of what she has gained and lost affirms the value of a life informed by two cultures. --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    A fascinating, bicultural look at upper-middle-class life in pre- and post-Revolution Iran.

    When she was eleven years old, Tara Bahrampour arrived in America with her family and five suitcases. Her American mother and Iranian father were fleeing Iran's Islamic Revolution. In the 1990s, she was the first member of her family to go back to Iran to visit her extended family and come to terms, as an adult, with the world she might have grown up in. To See and See Again is about three generations of a privileged Iranian family and about life in exile. Bahrampour describes the exotic Iran of her childhood; her family's attempt to lead a working-class life in Oregon; and her return to post-Revolution Iran, where she attends secret rock-and-roll parties, bakes bread with Kurdish separatists, and revisits her family's lost feudal empire, following the trail of Iran's volatile history with the West as she herself discovers how to synthesize both worlds.

    Compelling and lyrical, To See and See Again explores the complexity of the modern immigrant experience while offering an intimate portrait of a closed world on the verge of transformation.

  • 0374287678
  • 9780374287672
  • Tara Bahrampour
  • 1 January 1999
  • Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 361
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