Been seeing a lot of copies of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi getting handed out at Northern Voice 2006. I've had the book for a couple weeks now—the publisher, which is blogging, kindly sent me a review copy with a nice note. I'm halfway through the book now, and it's a nice combination of historical and cultural commentary from the author i.e. excerpts from Iranian weblogs written in Persian translated into English. In other words, so far a good combination of context and primary readings.
I'd love to see a lot more books that translate weblogs written in languages I can't read into English. Chinese would be the first language I'd push for, since I've long forgotten how to read the 200 or so characters learned in university, but excerpts of articles written in Brazilian Portuguese and Korean are languages I could see as being books I'd buy.
So what do you think about it? Post your review here.
Well, being only halfway done, I'm going to reserve my review until I've finished it. So far I like it: the split is half between weblog posts and context, and I might have liked more of the primary readings part, but not knowing enough about Iranian culture and history, I'm grateful for the secondary analysis.
It's nice to hear your mid-way point review too. Likewise, I didn't know a lot about Iranian culture so I like the background info and truly appreciate being able to read in English things that would otherwise be unaccessible to me. In some ways I wanted more essays and commentary from Nasrin, but I think the purpose was to provide a translated archive and let the reader make the assumptions.
I look forward to your comments after reading the full book.
I started reading 'We are Iran' yesterday and have almost reached the last few pages. I consider it an amazing book for a humble ignorant being like me. Lucidly written and with loving eyes for both, the pressurised bloggers and outsider that hardly if at all has ever catched a glimpse of the reality within Iran. This book takes you into a new world. Maybe I can relate to it better due to my current life in Syria - not the freest of all countries on Earth, especially for someone used to a Western democratic freedoms - maybe feeling the pressure that it cracking down on those bloggers and their readers in Iran is as vivid to anyone without autocratic experiences as it is to me.
Let us follow the idea that guided Nasrin Alavi. Let us try to spread the knowledge of complex (and if we have the chance of) closed socio-political systems. This might be the only way, in which socio-cultural/-political misunderstandings will be circumvented, in this time of the globalised media's, often strongly biased, factual normativity.
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