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Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times
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51/100Critics
87/100Scholars
Author:
Azar Nafisi
Publisher:
Dey Street Books
Date:
March 8, 2022
The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran offers a meditation on reading as an act of resistance. Written in the form of letters to Nafisi's father, the book considers questions of social justice through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and more.
What The Reviewers Say
Nafisi’s dispatches are eloquent essays on literature’s power to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In addressing them to one she loves dearly, she provides a built-in layer of warmth and understanding. But she still hits hard.
Nafisi’s father went to prison for four years because he insisted on fair and humane treatment for people he disagreed with. From father to daughter, there is a clear line in the moral and intellectual commitment to seeing the enemy’s humanity. Read Dangerously — criticism, memoir and argument as well as correspondence to a lost loved one — confirms that lineage.
Reading Dangerously is a political writer’s brilliant attempt to understand historical and political events, as well as human nature, such that one feels her struggle to offer honest, well considered suppositions. Her carefully chosen words and her attempt to articulate cogent analyses ultimately lead readers to deeper understanding of the importance of literature as an act of resistance.
This time, through five long letters, she vibrantly imagines conversations with her father Ahmad.
