Azar Nafisi, an expatriate Iranian author, dared to have a mind of her own in a country where the law demanded that she conform to official expectations. Nan Miller writes about her:

Living safely in the U.S. since 1997, Nafisi has been free to speak about “the dismal and deadly environment the Iranian regime has created” and free to write a memoir about the seven young women who met in secret at Nafisi’s home in Tehran to discuss the forbidden works of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. During those meetings, seven young women discovered, “It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming........

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