In 1929 Adelaide Kibbe was a 27-year-old missionary physician who set out from New York, on the steamer SS American Banker, headed for Iran. Her route to Persia took her through England, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland and Egypt. It would be 28 years before she returned home, and during the ensuing decades she would see huge changes in her adopted country: the development of modern roads, railway and air transport, the spread of telephones and radio, and modern schools in the cities (bringing literacy to girls as well as boys), and the growth of the modern University of Tehran. Through...