The Heartbeat of Iran in the New York Times

Tara Kangarlou’s upcoming, The Heartbeat of Iran, was featured in The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide:

Finally, for another look at a part of the world that is often shrouded by government-enforced silence, turn to Iran. If, more than landmarks or monuments, it is people that make a place, then Tara Kangarlou’s THE HEARTBEAT OF IRAN: Real Voices of a Country and Its People (Ig, 279 pp., paper, $19.95) is as much a guidebook as it is a piece of journalism. (Publication has been delayed until April.) Kangarlou, an Iranian-American journalist, explicitly hopes her collection of human stories, each chapter a profile of a different Iranian, will change perceptions of one of the countries she calls home. It is a mission born of personal experience, as she has seen firsthand the misconceptions about Iran that circulate in the West, informed by geopolitics rather than person-to-person interaction. The misconceptions and the blanket animosity have been stretched to such lengths that Kangarlou has often found people unwilling to accept that she can love both places: “I consider myself a proud Iranian and a proud American; I embrace my upbringing in Tehran, my unique education in both countries, and the ability to call two of the world’s most remarkable lands my home,” she writes.

Kangarlou offers a tour of the diversity of cultures, beliefs and experiences that exist in a country like Iran, often portrayed as a monolithic place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. There’s the reformist cleric, once arrested, now retired; the world’s only Muslim female racecar champion; the famous pilot, Iran’s answer to “Sully,” who saved a failing plane from a nearly fatal crash and has since spoken out about how sanctions are crippling the country as a whole and not just the government (he blames the plane’s mechanical failure on faulty black-market parts).

But the moments where Kangarlou’s book truly shines are when she turns to “ordinary” Iranians. In these chapters, it’s as if you are hearing family stories passed down through generations or having the kind of chance encounters that make traveling so rewarding. While Kangarlou’s writing can at times feel stilted and overly explanatory, it rarely matters because she gives people space to speak for themselves. Within these stories, there is the mundane: the struggles of a kebab shop owner in a time of hyperinflation and economic uncertainty, for example. And there’s also the extraordinary: the gay man who found the courage to come out in a country where sex between members of the same gender can lead to the death penalty, and the transgender woman who had to find a new family in the L.G.B.T.Q. community when her own struggled to accept her. Most of all, though, in every story, there’s that great lesson of travel: that far more unites us than separates us.