Posts From Author: foreign policy

“There are no real experts on Iran”: An interview with Hooman Majd

Hooman Majd (website | Twitter) is an Iranian-American journalist, commentator, and author. His three books — The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran; The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge; and The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay: An American Family in Iran (which we reviewed here) — present a view of Iran that’s at once insider and outsider. Born into a diplomatic family, Hooman has often been to Iran but has spent most of his life in the United States; his work reflects the tension and the correspondences between his two nationalities. Aside from his journalistic and authorial endeavors, he runs a very entertaining — and instructive — style blog called The House of Majd. I spoke to Hooman this week about returning to New York from the year he and his family spent in Tehran, Argo, and the state of US-Iranian relations. Charles Arrowsmith: I loved The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, and particularly the passages about how your wife and son adapted to life in Iran. What was it like to come back? Hooman Majd: Coming back was, to use the old cliché, bittersweet. I mean, we got used to life in Tehran — […]
Read More

Between the Crisis and the Catastrophe: Amanda Vaill on the Spanish Civil War

Spain’s war had become an experimental exercise — which will prevail, fascism or socialism? Whose weapons are stronger, Germany’s or Russia’s? — that the rest of the world was watching with interest. This is “a bleak and terrifying epiphany” for Arturo Barea, an aspiring writer working in Madrid as a press censor for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. When the conflict began, in 1936, Europe was shifting gears: those loyal to the Republican government found themselves ignored by a nervous Britain and France while the Nationalist insurgents, led by the ruthless General Franco, were being granted fabulous access to new innovations in warfare from Italy and a swiftly rearming Germany. Barea, realising that Spain was viewed internationally as little more than a test run for what was shaping up to be an even bigger conflict, was understandably put out. He’s one of a handful of characters at the centre of Amanda Vaill‘s superb close-up study of the conflict, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), and although of Vaill’s six protagonists he’s the only Spaniard, it’s his heart that the book’s beats in time with. His confreres on the frontline […]
Read More