Sohrab Ahmari is a classic immigrant success story. Born to intellectual, secular Iranian parents several years after the Islamic Revolution, his mother brought him to the US as a teen. Starting out in a Utah trailer park, able to understand the language but not always the culture due to his love of Hollywood films, he managed to earn his way into the Ivy League and eventually a job as op-ed editor of New York's premier newspaper, the New York Post.
But that isn't what this book is about. Rather, as the subtitle indicates, it is an explanation of the lifelong journey that led to his 2016 reception into the Catholic Church. Beginning with his childhood as a dissident Persian boy in love with an ideal America as the alternative to the mullahs, he then explores his disappointment with the real America, his adolescent passion for Nietzsche and collegiate passion for Trotsky and later embrace of neoconservatism and, finally, his ultimate dismissal of all utopian ideologies. Through it all, he movingly relates his growing recognition of the human need for order and therefore authority, an order and an authority not imposed by force but grown from sacrifice.
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