"A Young American in Iran," by Tom Klobe (Peace Corps Writers, $19.95)

At a time of escalating international tension, how refreshing it is to open a book dedicated "to the people of Alang and Iran — to their love and goodness."

Alang is the northern village where Tom Klobe, now a retired University of Hawaii at Manoa art professor, served in the Peace Corps from 1964 to ’66. Upon first receiving his assignment, the new UH graduate reflected, "What do I know about Iran? Only its rich and glorious ancient history from my art history classes. There are deserts, oil, and the Shah. That’s it." He will come to know a village of its people through immersion in their lives.

This illuminating and unpretentious memoir, filled with eloquent portraits, informed by an artist’s eye for meaningful detail and charged with the energy of youth, is also haunted by the sense of a vanished, shadowy past.

A statue of the shah dominates a town center where "Mercurys and Mercedes-Benzes jostle with donkeys and wooden carts. … Turkomans garbed in long coats and tall astrakhan hats stride impassively among ambling Iranians dressed in drab suits. Their women, wearing colorful floral shawls and embroidered headdresses that display dozens of long, finely braided tresses, submissively follow ten paces behind."

Overjoyed at first to meet a couple of other American Peace Corps trainees, he gets a reminder of our nation’s own tribal differences when the New Yorker, upon hearing that Klobe is from Hawaii, declares, "How provincial!"

Arriving at Alang, a farming village, he feels true loneliness amid a population of 2,000 housed in close quarters. He also craves privacy and time to himself. But it’s lovely country, near the border with the then-USSR, between the cloud-capped, forested Albor Mountains and the Caspian Sea.

On a hike near an ancient village site, he finds the 4,000-year-old fragment of a ceramic animal. This is the green, pastoral Persia of miniature paintings, with citrus groves, rice, cotton and flocks of sheep — and boys who throw rocks, shattering the windshield of the car that brings him.

The villagers are welcoming, however, and he learns Farsi and teaches English in the school, despite the Peace Corps’ insistence that he focus on community development projects instead. He is sobered by the isolation of women, even at a Christmas party among the educated set of his Peace Corps friends in a nearby town, where a young man is to be hanged for getting involved with a girl. She was stoned to death.

Genghis Khan’s destruction of Alang in the 13th century seems to come closer along with news dispatches arriving from the war in Vietnam.

It wasn’t until 2011, when Klobe and his wife, Delmarie, attended an Iran Peace Corps volunteer reunion that he learned how unique his experience as the sole foreigner in a remote village had been. Revisiting his letters from that time, he decided to write this book, illustrated with some of his photographs.

The mid-1960s, when America’s youth were still innocent and idealistic — but on the brink of getting suddenly much sadder and wiser — are a time worth revisiting, whether it’s through movies such as "Selma" or books like this one, which provide needed perspective on how individuals live and think while history is being made.