From Publishers Weekly
Time reporter Moaveni, the American-born child of Iranian exiles, spent two years (2000–2001) working in Tehran. Although she reports on the overall tumult and repression felt by Iranians between the 1999 pro-democracy student demonstrations and the 2002 "Axis of Evil" declaration, the book's dominant story is more intimate. Moaveni was on a personal search "to figure out my relationship" to Iran. Neither her adolescent ethnic identity conundrums nor her idyllic memories of a childhood visit prepared her for the realities she confronted as she navigated Iran, learning its rules, restrictions and taboos—and how to evade and even exploit them like a local. Because she was a journalist, the shadowy, unnerving presence of an Iranian intelligence agent/interrogator hovered continually ("it would be useful if we saw your work before publication," he told her). Readers also get intimate glimpses of domestic life: Moaveni lived among family and depicts clandestine partying, women's gyms and the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Eventually, Moaveni became "more at home than [her mother] was" in Iran, and a visit to the U.S. showed how Moaveni, who now lives in Beirut, had grown unaccustomed to American life, "where my Iranian instincts served no purpose." Lipstick Jihad is a catchy title, but its flippancy does a disservice to Moaveni's nuanced narrative. Agent, Diana Finch. (Mar.)Forecast:This work, as well as Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time, reviewed above, joins the recent explosion of memoirs by women about living in Iran, and could be displayed alongside Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Like characters in a play whose first act takes place in the lush summer and whose second act is set against barren winter trees, Iranians have spent the last quarter-century defining themselves against the contrasting backdrops of pre- and post-1979 Iran. Those who stayed in Iran after the Islamic revolution are faced with its consequences every day; those who fled the country are only somewhat more removed. Haunted by loss (of loved ones, of fortunes, of social networks) and sometimes by guilt (for supporting the shah or the revolution too blindly, or for staying too much out of the fray), many have spent these 26 years licking their wounds and mourning their old lives. It has fallen largely to the younger generation to analyze this experience for Western readers. With a few exceptions, the recent crop of Iran memoirs has been written by women who were children when the revolution struck. Now in their twenties and thirties, they are fluent in English but still conversant in their parents' language, able to explain the intricate latticework of Persian society in the easy, often self-deprecating style of the American autobiography.Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni, and Even After All This Time, by Afschineh Latifi, offer two versions of this, one of which works better than the other. For Latifi, an Iranian-born New York attorney, Iran switched from dream to nightmare when her father, a colonel in the shah's army, was executed after the revolution. Goodbye to BMWs, swimming clubs and a happy, secure family; hello to relatives seeking to marry off the preteen Latifi sisters to uneducated villagers while angling for the family's remaining assets. The sisters were sent abroad, but Europe and America proved in some ways as traumatic as what they had fled. Eventually they found professional success and were reunited with their mother and brothers in the United States.Latifi's story is emblematic of many immigrants' experiences -- the fashion faux pas, the English learned from "The Brady Bunch" -- but her book often reads like a litany of these experiences instead of a distillation of them. She seems to have recorded every scene she can remember from her life, in faithful order, giving each equal weight -- a technique that may work in a legal document but feels diffuse in a memoir. She records the date of each sibling's and parent's birthday, provides a staggering 113 family snapshots, and includes minutiae about short-term jobs and law school parties that seem unrelated to the book's themes. Yet the scene in which her mother reveals to her brothers how their father died, years after the fact, gets only a page and is summed up with "there was a great deal of crying in the house that night." At age 9, Latifi was told that the revolution was engineered by the "intensely fanatical . . . fundamentalist mujahedeen"; as she grew older, she didn't examine it much beyond that. If she ever reflected, during her lonely teenage exile, on why the uprising was so popular, if she ever felt ambivalence about her family's former privileged position or anger at her father's tragic refusal to flee, these feelings are trumped by loyalty to her parents, whose absence of flaws in her eyes makes them lack dimension as characters. Latifi's view of Iran is black and white, and a quick trip back there at the end of the book doesn't add nuance; after she and her mother have trouble at a hotel because they are unaccompanied women, she laments that "these people have ruined Iran" and hurries back to New York. Azadeh Moaveni was born in 1976 into an Iranian expatriate community in northern California that similarly viewed Iran as "a place of light, poetry and nightingales" taken over by "a dark, evil force called the Revolution." As a child she absorbed these "distorting myths of exile," and as a teenager she added her own cultural identity crises to the brew. But having missed the revolution herself, Moaveni grew up less encumbered by the history that weighed on the adults around her, and when she decided to try living and working as a journalist in Tehran, she became a conduit for Iranians and Westerners to gain new perspectives on the country.She arrived in 2000, when Iran's reformists had started to lose their teeth and their rock-star appeal and the conservatives had eased up on sartorial restrictions while continuing their assault on political freedoms. Moaveni is part of Iran's largest generation, the two-thirds of the country who are under 30 and are more interested in the latest rhinoplasty surgeons and bloggers than in the university's Friday prayer sessions. Some there saw her as a foreigner, and some considered her a wash-up for still being unmarried at 24, but on the whole she blended in with other Iranians and joined in their complex relationship with a country that evokes both fierce love and utter despair from its inhabitants. Years of civil rights abuses make Iranians "dream more modestly," but the criminalization of sexuality makes them crackle with sexual energy. Teenagers in 5-inch heels use martyrs' holidays as an excuse to throw make-out parties; disillusioned matrons trade Islam for yoga; mullahs who rail against "bourgeois" miniature poodles try to get Moaveni's cell phone number for a date. Lipstick Jihad's sensational-sounding title is in fact apt. It refers to Iranians who, despite the regime's dictates, insist on what Moaveni calls an "as if" lifestyle, living as if it were permitted to "speak your mind, challenge authority . . . wear too much lipstick." Women especially engage every day in this "slow, deliberate, widespread act of defiance. A jihad, in the classical sense of the word: a struggle." Moaveni has a journalist's eye for that struggle and a memoirist's knack for finding meaning in her own internal conflicts. For her, living in Iran meant inhabiting the "what if" world she might have grown up in, the oft-imagined world made flesh. Much of the time she felt alienated by it, but she writes affectingly of a moment in which her two worlds converged, on a ski slope when a friend used a Farsi term for "dear" that Moaveni recalled from the Iranians in California. "Until then, I had believed smells were the keys that unlocked memory, uniquely able to transport you back to some distant point in the past, in a heady flash. . . . But when I heard the word aziz, that endearment woven into the fabric of my childhood . . . I melted like a cat picked up by the scruff of its neck." Despite such moments, Moaveni eventually abandoned the struggle to live in Iran. But her journey there provides a welcome alternative to the dark/light vision of it she grew up with. Her book shows us what Iran looks like in spring and fall, with all those seasons' biting winds and unexpected days of sunshine.Reviewed by Tara Bahrampour Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
After growing up in suburban California, where she never felt fully comfortable, Moaveni moved in 2000 to Iran, the land her parents had fled. Although she spent her childhood aching to live in Tehran, the place she discovers is nothing like she imagined--and, indeed, not what most of us imagine, either. She describes a sprawling city choked by smog and traffic; people "preoccupied by sex in the manner of dieters constantly thinking about food"; and, of course, the volunteer Morality Police, whose brazen cruelty has to be read about to be believed. Moaveni has captured Tehran's youth, the "student demonstrators" often in the news, in both their worldliness and their ignorance. And although much of the writing tells more than it shows, Moaveni is riveting when she works her way into a scene--capturing, for instance, the horror of a girl who must not react when the Morality Police beat her boyfriend lest they find out she is breaking shariah by dating. Not quite Persepolis without the pictures, but good stuff all the same. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Washington City Paper, March 25, 2005
"Moaveni chronicles her life in Iran with clarity and humor. . . [She] is an astute observer, steeped in politics."

Elle.com, March 2005
"Moaveni's memoir takes us where we've never been before, or even read about in the daily papers."

Tara Bahrampour, Washington Post Book World, March 20, 2005
"Lipstick Jihad's sensational-sounding title is in fact apt... Moaveni has a journalist's eye for struggle."

Entertainment Weekly, March 25, 2005
"Lipstick Jihad's tug between objective reporting and Moaveni's subjectivity . . . shines a fascinating light on a nation at odds with itself."

LA Weekly, March 18, 2005
"Moaveni paints a damning portrait of daily life in Tehran with a hundred fascinating, subtle details."

Kirkus Reviews (starred), January 15, 2005
"beautifully nuanced, complex, and illuminating. . . Moaveni makes Iran a distinct entity. A must."

San Diego Union-Tribune, March 20, 2005
"For the reader, [Moaveni] is the ultimate guide."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 20, 2005
"The verdict: A moving memoir of identity."

New York Times Book Reviewv, March 13, 2005
"Moaveni writes unusually well and perceptively."

St.Petersburg Times, March 27, 2005
Moaveni . . . offers a deeply personal first glimpse of Gen X Iranians in the United States and Iran . . . [with] irresistible vitality.

Book Description
A young Iranian-American journalist returns to Tehran and discovers not only the oppressive and decadent life of her Iranian counterparts who have grown up since the revolution, but the pain of searching for a homeland that may not exist. As far back as she can remember, Azadeh Moaveni has felt at odds with her tangled identity as an Iranian-American. In suburban America, Azadeh lived in two worlds. At home, she was the daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense stand off between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Iran as a journalist. This is the story of her search for identity, between two cultures cleaved apart by a violent history. It is also the story of Iran, a restive land lost in the twilight of its revolution. Moaveni's homecoming falls in the heady days of the country's reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. In these tumultuous times, she struggles to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron and turquoise-tinted Iran of her imagination. As she leads us through the drug-soaked, underground parties of Tehran, into the hedonistic lives of young people desperate for change, Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Iran's rebellious next generation. The landscape of her Tehran-ski slopes, fashion shows, malls and cafes-is populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair brings the modern reality of Iran to vivid life.

About the Author
Azadeh Moaveni grew up in San Jose and studied politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She won a Fulbright fellowship to Egypt, and studied Arabic at the American University in Cairo. For three years she worked across the Middle East as a reporter for Time Magazine, before joining the Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. She lives in Beirut.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Azadeh Moaveni was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away. As far back as she can remember she felt at odds with her tangled identity. She seemed to be living in two worlds. At home, she was a daughter of the Iranian exile community, serving tea, clinging to tradition, and dreaming of Tehran. Outside, she was a California girl who practiced yoga and listened to Madonna. For years, she ignored the tense stand-off between her two cultures. But college magnified the clash between Iran and America, and after graduating, she moved to Tehran as a journalist." "Upon arrival in Iran, Azadeh's exile fantasies dissolve. She finds a country that is culturally confused, politically deadlocked, and emotionally anguished. Her homecoming falls smack in the heady days of the reform movement, when young people demonstrated in the streets and shouted for the Islamic regime to end. Deciding to live an approximation of a young Iranian's life, she delves deep into Tehran's edgy underground. She crashes the drug-soaked parties of the upper-crust. She visits the ski slopes, fashion shows, malls, and cafes where Iran's hedonistic and rebellious next generation mingles, inert, yet desperate for change. As she explores the psychologies of these young people - demographically, the country's future - she discovers the kitsch, hedonism, and frustration that underpin their lurching rebellion against the Islamic system." In Lipstick Jihad, Azadeh Moaveni paints a rare portrait of Tehran, populated by a cast of young people whose exuberance and despair bring the modern reality of Iran to vivid life. She also reveals her private struggle to build a life in a dark country, wholly unlike the luminous, saffron-tinted Iran of her imagination. Hers is the struggle of a young woman of the diaspora, searching for a homeland that may not exist.

FROM THE CRITICS

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

In her compelling new memoir, Lipstick Jihad, Azadeh Moaveni gives the reader a guided tour through the underground youth culture in Tehran, introducing us to kids who follow an " 'as if' lifestyle," as though their society were not under the thumb of hard-line mullahs, as though it were "permitted to hold hands on the street, blast music at parties, speak your mind, challenge authority, take your drug of choice, grow your hair long, wear too much lipstick."

Tara Bahrampour - The Washington Post

… Moaveni eventually abandoned the struggle to live in Iran. But her journey there provides a welcome alternative to the dark/light vision of it she grew up with. Her book shows us what Iran looks like in spring and fall, with all those seasons' biting winds and unexpected days of sunshine.

Publishers Weekly

Time reporter Moaveni, the American-born child of Iranian exiles, spent two years (2000-2001) working in Tehran. Although she reports on the overall tumult and repression felt by Iranians between the 1999 pro-democracy student demonstrations and the 2002 "Axis of Evil" declaration, the book's dominant story is more intimate. Moaveni was on a personal search "to figure out my relationship" to Iran. Neither her adolescent ethnic identity conundrums nor her idyllic memories of a childhood visit prepared her for the realities she confronted as she navigated Iran, learning its rules, restrictions and taboos-and how to evade and even exploit them like a local. Because she was a journalist, the shadowy, unnerving presence of an Iranian intelligence agent/interrogator hovered continually ("it would be useful if we saw your work before publication," he told her). Readers also get intimate glimpses of domestic life: Moaveni lived among family and depicts clandestine partying, women's gyms and the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Eventually, Moaveni became "more at home than [her mother] was" in Iran, and a visit to the U.S. showed how Moaveni, who now lives in Beirut, had grown unaccustomed to American life, "where my Iranian instincts served no purpose." Lipstick Jihad is a catchy title, but its flippancy does a disservice to Moaveni's nuanced narrative. Agent, Diana Finch. (Mar.) Forecast: This work, as well as Afschineh Latifi's Even After All This Time, reviewed above, joins the recent explosion of memoirs by women about living in Iran, and could be displayed alongside Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews