Persepolis -- the best book on Iran I've ever read

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is a insider story of:

• the Iranian revolution,
• the Gulf (Iran-Iraq) War (about which we in the West were so cruelly complacent),
• how fugitives to the West are mostly welcomed by the alternative cultures, not the mainstream ones
• Teenagerhood
• Freedom and its contradictions
  

and with a walk on part by

• God.

It's all told in cartoon form. It's the best thing I've ever read on Iran and one of the best books I've read about living under an Islamist regime.

(I also just finishedThe Reluctant Fundamentalist.
This novella also a lot of fun and well worth reading, but compared with Persepolis is a bit pompous and self-important.)

I found it the sort of book you have to put down while you walk around and try to think about it. Things like:

• Why don't we understand Iranians as victims of totalitarianism, quite as much as people in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia?
• How much teenagers need surrogate parents and grandparents;
• How people can end up on the streets; and get off them again.

What a gem of a book.