Soon after she first began working with foreign journalists in Tehran, Nazila Fathi was summoned to the Intelligence Ministry to be questioned about her activities. She approached the interview with trepidation, but in the end the ministry cleared her for an official permit to continue her work. The Iranian authorities were suspicious of international media but, Fathi writes, found some value in allowing them to give the outside world a somewhat balanced impression of life under the revolutionary regime. As she saw it, their reasoning went like this:

Ever since the revolution, Western governments and media outlets had demonized Iranians, portraying them as armed men and black-clad women chanting, Death to America. But there was so much more to Iran than this. There was life beneath the surface; there were ordinary people all over the country who longed for freedom and dignity just as people did in any other part of the world. Even though the regime aimed to stamp out these impulses, it had also realized that, by spreading evidence of them around the world, people like me were helping improve the countrys image.

That aim giving a more rounded, varied view of her country and its now 60 million people is also the central theme and achievement of this memoir.

A Lonely War opens in 1979, when Fathi was nine years old. That was the year when a popular uprising overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi and installed a theocratic revolutionary regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. From that beginning, the book chronicles the next three and a half decades of the Islamic Republic of Iran as Fathi experienced them, first as a teenager, then as a young translator and fixer for foreign journalists, and eventually as the full-time Tehran correspondent for the New York Times until threats from the authorities forced her to flee into exile in 2009.

The country we see through Fathis lens is a place of astonishing contradictions. It calls to mind the clinical description of what psychiatrists used to call Multiple Personality Disorder, in which two or more distinct identities or personality states are present, each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and self.

Fathi does not use psychiatric terms, but her description is similar: Two different cultures lived side by side in our country; one was modern and relatively secular, the other traditional and intensely religious. The 1979 revolution had nurtured the hostility between these two different strains of Iranian culture by encouraging the religious people to police secular people, to dominate their lives by telling them what they must and must not do.

Beside showing the conflict between those two cultures, Fathis experiences and her reporting on the larger society also show that Islamic fundamentalism in Iran is not the same as the Taliban in neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Iranians may be strict, even brutal, about such issues as modest dress for women (Fathi was once sharply reprimanded for wearing white so