When Houshang Asadi's feet hurt, he doesn't have to wonder why.
They've been that way for 25 years, since the days when he was
regularly beaten in an Iranian prison. The Islamist government's
jailers knew well that the soles of the feet make an inviting
target—rich in sensitive nerve endings and easily crushed bones.
Memories of his imprisonment and torture in the early 1980s, Mr.
Asadi says, still brought on tears every morning when he sat
down to write about life before he escaped to Paris in 2003 from
"the mega-prison that is today's Iran," as he calls his former
home in the extraordinary memoir "Letters to My Torturer."  The
book would be remarkable on any terms, but it is made especially
memorable by the chilling irony and heartbreaking naïveté that
characterize Mr. Asadi's tale. His first experience of being
imprisoned for political reasons comes as a young communist in
the 1970s, when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's government decides
he is a threat. For several months Mr. Asadi shares a cell with
someone