Posts From Author: syria

“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 — […]
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The Lie of Remembrance: Philip Gourevitch on the Rwandan Genocide

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch NY: Picador, 1999 [first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998]; 356pp This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. In the hundred days that followed the downing of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on April 6, 1994, at least eight hundred thousand people, mostly Tutsis, were killed in what the journalist and author Philip Gourevitch has called “the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (Rwanda is a country not much larger than Vermont; to put the numbers in perspective, the population of Vermont is less than seven hundred thousand.) Almost immediately, the genocide was followed by a colossal refugee crisis, as Hutus fearful of a Tutsi retaliation fled to Zaire (as it was then), Uganda, Burundi, and Tanzania. Disease killed thousands. Retributive violence was widespread. The wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo that stretched halfway through the first decade of this century were an indirect consequence of what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Next year Gourevitch will publish a follow-up to his landmark 1998 account of the genocide, We Wish To Inform […]
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