Iran Memoir

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

In Captive in Iran, Maryam and Marziyeh recount their 259 days in Evin. It’s an amazing story of unyielding faith - when denying God would have meant freedom. Of incredible support from strangers around the world who fought for the women’s release. And of bringing God’s light into one of the world’s darkest places - giving hope to those who had lost everything, and showing love to those in despair.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A hugely ambitious, “delightfully readable, genuinely informative” portrait (The New York Times) of the two-centuries-long entwined histories of Iran and America—two powers who were once allies and now adversaries—by an admired...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the Audie Award in Biography/Memoir “Remarkable . . . told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality . . . In the end, what sticks with the reader is an exuberant...

In this remarkably human portrait of one of the 20th century's most complicated personalities, author Andrew Scott Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He highlights the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world's top five powers.

JOHN BOLTON READS THE EPILOGUE! As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a “scathing and revelatory” (The New Yorker) White House memoir that is the most comprehensive...

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists...

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Shariat together with his wife, prayed, “Lord, use us to save Iran!” His passion for Muslims stems, in part, because of the murder of his brother, Hamraz, who was arrested in Iran at the age of 16 on a minor political charge. After two years in jail, he was executed by firing squad. God showed Hormoz the best way to respond to this tragedy was to dedicate his life to bring one million Muslims to salvation in Christ. Join Dr. Shariat on a journey out of bondage to Islam to freedom in Christ.

In the years since 9/11, the U.S. war on terror has focused on al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Coverage of Iran has been devoted almost exclusively to its nuclear ambitions. Yet, as Ronen Bergman's groundbreaking reporting in this vital investigative history reveals, for 30 years, Iran has been the world's leading sponsor of global terror and stands as the most formidable sponsor of terror in the world today.

Forced to become a normal citizen, the exiled son of the late Shah of Iran attempts to provide understanding and direction for his country and its people.

In today's Tehran, intrigues abound and survival depends on an intricate network of falsehoods: mullahs visit prostitutes, local mosques train barely pubescent boys in crowd-control tactics, and cosmetic surgeons promise to restore girls' virginity. Navai paints an intimate portrait of those discreet recesses in a city where the difference between modesty and profanity, loyalty and betrayal, honor and disgrace is often no more than the believability of a lie.

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Part personal chronicle and part political journey…a candid assessment of some of her colleagues in the White House and the media.” —The Washington Post Among the Trump era’s savviest insiders, one name stands especially tall: Kellyanne. As a...

Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At 18 she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in prerevolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes in her life and community - primarily the disparate religions and cultures.

On the streets of every city a true life battle between revenge and justice is fought. Marginalized communities caught in the crossfire of violence, poverty, drugs, and abuse, seem to spiral. To those on the outside, it is too easily brushed off and judged as just the way things are. To those on the inside, what happens stems from a fight for survival, a longing for family stability, and is a reflection of all they’ve ever known. Author Iran Nazario has lived this. Beaten and abused as a child, witnessing and experiencing things no child should, he was forced to grow up too fast.

From Qasem Soleimani to the nuclear deal, a deeply reported exploration of Iran’s decades-long power struggle with the United States—in the tradition of Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower “A front-row view of the spy games, assassinations, political...

Until his assassination by US drone strike in January 2020, commander Qassem Soleimani was one of the most powerful men in Iran and the military spearhead for Iranian foreign policy, enacting the wishes of the country's Supreme Leader in the region. A widely popular but also feared maverick operator, he helped to establish the Islamic Republic as a major force in the Middle East, with interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. This was a long way from where he began as a youth, living on the margins in a country ruled by a monarch supported by the United States.

"A Prison Story - Iran," tells a compelling story of a young woman arrested on a Tehran street for distributing pro-democracy literature in 1981. It reveals the workings of a despotic regime in suppressing voices of reason and consolidating power.

Diana Nammi became a fighter with the Peshmerga when she was only 17. Originally known as Galavezh, she grew up in the Kurdish region of Iran in the 1960s and 70s. She became involved in politics as a teenager and, like many students, played a part in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. But the new Islamic regime tolerated no opposition, and after Kurdistan was brutally attacked, Galavezh found that she had no choice but to become a soldier in the famed military force.

In 2009, Samieh Hezari made a terrible mistake. She flew from her adopted home of Ireland to her birthplace in Iran so her 14-month-old daughter, Rojha, could be introduced to the child's father. When the violent and unstable father refused to allow his daughter to leave and demanded that Samieh renew their relationship, a two-week holiday became a desperate five-year battle to get her daughter out of Iran. If Samieh could not do so before Rojha turned seven, the father could take sole custody - forever.

Heydar Radjavi's evocations of growing up in Tabriz in the 1930s and 1940s describe a traditionalist Iran grappling with modernity, a process as fraught with contradictions and stresses then as it is in Iran today. The tone is always light, the memories wonderfully vivid, and the underlying theme of tension between old and new truly timeless.