Tag Archives: Iran

Is It Time to Bring Out Twain’s War Prayer?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2015

The GOP and Netanyahu are trying to sabotage Obama’s negotiations with Iran. Could Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” knock some sense into them?

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Family Melodrama, Iranian Style

By Robin Bates | Published: March 23, 2012

The Oscar-winning Iranian film “Separation” builds complication upon complication as families wrestle with difficult conditions.

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War’s Human Costs (So Rethink Iran)

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2012

Levertov’s “What Were They Like” gives us a poem that may help dampen hysteria about going to war with Iran.

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If Indiana Jones Raided Iran . . .

By Robin Bates | Published: November 18, 2011

The scene in “Raiders of the Lost Arc” where Indiana Jones defeats a sword-twirling antagonist by shooting him articulates a fantasy that most of the Republican candidates for president are indulging in as they discuss Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions.

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Iranian Women Identifying with Lolita

By Robin Bates | Published: July 2, 2009

The kicker in the book title Reading Lolita in Iran is the shock of imagining people risking their freedom to read Nabokov’s scandalous masterpiece about an elderly writer who falls in love with twelve-year-old “nymphet” Dolores Hayes. What would anyone get out of that experience? The surprises keep on coming in Azar Nafisi’s book as […]

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