"From a gifted writer delightful, funny, evocative, enlightening, nostalgic stories about growing up in Iran in the 1940s. A must-read for anyone who wants to know how traditional, conservative Iranian households dealt with modernization.?Willem Floor, author of A Social History of Sexual Relations in IranHeydar Radjavi describes each episode in his school years with lucidity and consummate art. He shows a very traditionalist Azerbaijani family grappling with modernity. The father and son are nicely contrasted in their own worlds. While the young Heydar is becoming part of a modernizing world, the father is clinging to his fast disappearing world.?Hasan Javadi, editor and translator of Obeyd-e Zakani: Ethics of the Aristocrats and other Satirical WorksHeydar Radjavi?s memories of the 1930s and 1940s, when he was growing up in Iran (a country he describes as one that has been ?in ambivalent flirtation with modernity for the past hundred years?), are a delightful and moving evocation of a vanished past. His wise, witty, gentle, and eminently humane voice is one that is irresistibly attractive, and the anecdotes he recounts have a quiet, resonant charm that stays in the mind long after the book is closed.

This little book is a gem, as a memoir and as a human document. ?Dick Davis, author of Epic and Sedition: A Case for Ferdowsi?s Shahnameh".