Little did he know, as he kissed her good-bye, that he would spend the next three months in Iran’s most notorious prison, enduring brutal interrogation sessions at the hands of a man he knew only by his smell: Rosewater.For the Bahari family, wars, coups, and revolutions are not distant concepts but intimate realities they have suffered for generations: Maziar’s father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Alone in his cell at Evin Prison, fearing the worst, Maziar draws strength from his memories of the courage of his father and sister in the face of torture, and hears their voices speaking to him across the years. He dreams of being with Paola in London, and imagines all that she and his rambunctious, resilient eighty-four-year-old mother must be doing to campaign for his release. During the worst of his encounters with Rosewater, he silently repeats the names of his loved ones, calling on their strength and love to protect him and praying he will be released in time for the birth of his first child. A riveting, heart-wrenching memoir, Rosewater offers insight into the past seventy years of regime change in Iran, as well as the future of a country where the democratic impulses of the youth continually clash with a government that becomes more totalitarian with each passing day. An intimate and fascinating account of contemporary Iran, it is also the moving and wonderfully written story of one family’s extraordinary courage in the face of repression.Now a major motion picture directed by Jon Stewart - Previously published as Then They Came for Me.

    Operation Ajax is the first true-to-life spy thriller in a new genre of interactive comics experiences.Designed specifically for the iPad, Operation Ajax is an original story inspired by the investigative journalism of best-selling author, Stephen Kinzer, and his work All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.~From cognitocomics.com

    . . European nations at risk of defaulting on their loans . . . A possible global financial crisis. It happened before, in the 1970s . Oil Kings is the story of how oil came to dominate U.S. domestic and international affairs. As Richard Nixon fought off Watergate inquiries in 1973, the U.S. economy reacted to an oil shortage initiated by Arab nations in retaliation for American support of Israel in the Arab- Israeli war. The price of oil skyrocketed, causing serious inflation. One man the U.S. could rely on in the Middle East was the Shah of Iran, a loyal ally whose grand ambitions had made him a leading customer for American weapons. Iran sold the U.S. oil; the U.S. sold Iran missiles and fighter jets. But the Shah’s economy depended almost entirely on oil, and the U.S. economy could not tolerate annual double-digit increases in the price of this essential commodity. European economies were hit even harder by the soaring oil prices, and several NATO allies were at risk of default on their debt. In 1976, with the U.S. economy in peril, President Gerald Ford, locked in a tight election race, decided he had to find a country that would sell oil to the U.S. more cheaply and break the OPEC monopoly, which the Shah refused to do. On the advice of Treasury Secretary William Simon and against the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Ford made a deal to sell advanced weaponry to the Saudis in exchange for a modest price hike on oil. Ford lost the election, but the deal had lasting consequences. The Shah’s economy was destabilized, and disaffected elements in Iran mobilized to overthrow him. The U.S. had embarked on a long relationship with the autocratic Saudi kingdom that continues to this day. Andrew Scott Cooper draws on newly declassified documents and interviews with some key figures of the time to show how Nixon, Ford, Kissinger, the CIA, and the State and Treasury departments—as well as the Shah and the Saudi royal family— maneuvered to control events in the Middle East. He details the secret U.S.-Saudi plan to circumvent OPEC that destabilized the Shah. He reveals how close the U.S. came to sending troops into the Persian Gulf to break the Arab oil embargo. The Oil Kings provides solid evidence that U.S. officials ignored warning signs of a potential hostage crisis in Iran. It discloses that U.S. officials offered to sell nuclear power and nuclear fuel to the Shah. And it shows how the Ford Administration barely averted a European debt crisis that could have triggered a financial catastrophe in the U.S. Brilliantly reported and filled with astonishing details about some of the key figures of the time, The Oil Kings is the history of an era that we thought we knew, an era whose momentous reverberations still influence events at home and abroad today.

    As the story starts, Ashley is eight years old and living in Tehran in the 1960s: the Shah was in power, and life for Westerners was rich and privileged. But somehow it didn't all add up to a fairytale. There were bankruptcies and prisons, betrayals and lovers, lies and evasions—and throughout it all, Ashley's passionate and strong-willed mother, Genie. Stories of mothers and daughters are some of the most compelling in contemporary memoir, from The Liar's Club and The Glass Castle, to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Bad Blood. Farangi Girl deserves to be in their company. It's an honest and endlessly recognizable portrait of a mother by a daughter who loved her (and was loved in return). Against this extraordinary background, Ashley's journey into adulthood was more helter-skelter than most and this portrait of a bewitching and endlessly inventive mother is surprising and deeply moving.

    While in prison, she is the victim of extreme violence. A vibrant and strong-willed young woman, she decides after her release to seek justice, a difficult proposition in a country where the rule of law is arbitrary at best, where women don’t count for much, and where conservative Islamic factions, despite being at each others’ throats, will present a united front where the survival of the regime is at stake Beyond describing Raha’s terrible ordeal and her fight, against all odds, to obtain redress, the novel places the story in the context of a fascinating and complicated country and offers deep insights into the Iranian psyche. At the core of the novel is the moving relation that develops between Raha who belongs to a well-to-do family from the rich suburbs of Northern Tehran and Hossein, a sepahi (or Revolutionary Guard), from one the poorer neighborhoods, and how they overcome their completely different backgrounds to touch each other’s lives in a way neither will ever forget.

    Sworn by an oath of loyalty to Iran's Supreme Leader, the IRGC is the regime's Praetorian Guard, the custodian of its nuclear program, and now a juggernaut in Iran's economy. Since 1979, the Guards have played a key role in protecting the Revolution internally against domestic opposition while actively seeking to export it abroad. The IRGC has been at the forefront of repression every time ordinary Iranians have protested their lack of freedoms, including after the fraudulent presidential elections of June 2009. Iran's sponsorship of terrorism abroad is also executed through the IRGC's overseas operations' branch, the Qods Forces. In The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Emanuele Ottolenghi offers a detailed overview of how the IRGC came into being, how the Guards rose to a position of prominence in Iran's current power structure, how they have penetrated Iran's economy, how they are working to help Iran attain nuclear weapons, and why they will likely play a key role in Iran for decades to come.

    It is a country of contrasts, where high-rise city buildings stand beside ancient mosques, vast deserts sprawl alongside mountains and forests, and what was once the ancient Persian civilisation is now the oil-rich Islamic Republic of Iran. From Bazaar to Naan, from Chelo-kabab to Rugs, this book celebrates everything Iranians love best about their country. I is for Iran is the latest in the highly successful and widely recognised World Alphabet series, each of which is written and/or photographed by a national of the country.

    Drawing on archival documents and manuscript sources from Iran and elsewhere, FiroozehKashani-Sabet illustrates how debates over hygiene, reproductive politics, and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explained demographic trends and put women at the center of nationalist debates. Exploring women's lives under successive regimes, she chronicles the hygiene campaignsthat cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; government policies on contraception and population control; and tensions between religion and secularism.

    In his book on constitutional revolutions in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, Nader Sohrabi considers global diffusion of institutions and ideas, their regional and local networking, and the long-term consequences for adaptation to local exigencies. There are lessons to be learned here. The revolutions, despite the differing social structures of the societies in which they happened, shared the same objectives and demands. Furthermore, the suddenness and simultaneity of their appearance point to a commonality that transcended the localities. Arguing that revolutions are time-bound phenomena whose forms follow global models in vogue at particular historical junctures, the book challenges the ahistorical and purely local understanding of them. Furthermore, it provides a strong case that macrostructural preconditions alone cannot explain the occurrence of revolutions; rather, global waves, intervention of agency, and additional contingent events work together to bring them about in competition with other possible outcomes. Beyond concern for how and why revolutions happen, the book offers a comparative account of the process of institutionalizing constitutionalism in two settings. The comparison highlights many similarities in the powers struggles, including the paradox inherent in the "constitutional revolutions." Comparison also affords exploration of a key difference: the reason for greater resilience of democratic institutions in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey in contrast to Iran. In making his case, Sohrabi draws on a wide array of archival and primary sources that afford a minute look at the revolutions as they unfold.

    Recasting Iranian Modernity presents the argument that Eurocentrism can be decisively overcome through a social theory that has international relations at its ontological core. This will enable a conception of history in which there is an intrinsic international dimension to social change that prevents historical repetition.This hitherto under-theorized international dimension is, the book argues, manifest in combined patterns of development, which incorporate both foreign and native forms. It is the tension-prone and unstable nature of these hybrid developmental patterns that mark Iranian modernity, and fuelled the socio-political dynamics of the 1979 revolution and the rise of political Islam.Challenging solely comparative approaches to the Iranian Revolution that explain it away as either a deviation from, or a reaction to, modernity on the grounds of its religious form, this book will be valuable to those interested in an alternative theoretical approach to the Iranian Revolution, modern Iran and political Islam, working in the fields of International Relations, Middle East and Islamic Studies, History, Political Science, Political Sociology, Postcolonialism, and Comparative Politics.

    Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Iranian women writers.

    Covering the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first and addressing documentaries, popular genres, and art films, it explains Iran’s peculiar cinematic production modes, as well as the role of cinema and media in shaping modernity and a modern national identity in Iran. This comprehensive social history unfolds across four volumes, each of which can be appreciated on its own.Volume 1 depicts and analyzes the early years of Iranian cinema. Film was introduced in Iran in 1900, three years after the country’s first commercial film exhibitor saw the new medium in Great Britain. An artisanal cinema industry sponsored by the ruling shahs and other elites soon emerged. The presence of women, both on the screen and in movie houses, proved controversial until 1925, when Reza Shah Pahlavi dissolved the Qajar dynasty. Ruling until 1941, Reza Shah implemented a Westernization program intended to unite, modernize, and secularize his multicultural, multilingual, and multiethnic country. Cinematic representations of a fast-modernizing Iran were encouraged, the veil was outlawed, and dandies flourished. At the same time, photography, movie production, and movie houses were tightly controlled. Film production ultimately proved marginal to state formation. Only four silent feature films were produced in Iran; of the five Persian-language sound features shown in the country before 1941, four were made by an Iranian expatriate in India.A Social History of Iranian CinemaVolume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897–1941Volume 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978Volume 3: The Islamicate Period, 1978–1984Volume 4: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010

    Although the latest research bears this out, it also presents a grim portrait of the state of women’s employment. Approximately seventy percent of those living on less than a dollar a day are women or girls.In Veiled Employment, the editors seek to examine these stark disparities, focusing on the evolving role of women’s employment in Iran. Based on empirical field research in Iran, the contributors’ essays document the accelerating trend in the size and diversity of women’s employment since the 1990s and explore the impact of various governmental policies on women. The volume analyzes such issues as the effect of global trade on female employment, women’s contribution to the informal work sector, and Iranian female migrant workers in the United States. Rejecting the commonly held view that centers on Islam as the primary cause of women’s status in the Muslim world, the authors emphasize the role of the national and international political economies. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, these scholars reveal the ways in which women in Iran have resisted and challenged Islamism, revealing them as agents of social transformation rather than as victims of religious fundamentalism.

    Subsequently, architects, designers, and commercial advertisers shifted their attention from commercial and public architecture to the new home and its contents. Domesticity and consumer culture also became topics of interest among politicians, Shiite religious scholars, and the Left, who communicated their respective views via the popular media and numerous other means. In the interim, ordinary Iranian families, who were capable of selectively appropriating aspects of their immediate surroundings, demonstrated their resistance toward the officially sanctioned transformations. Through analyzing a series of case studies that elucidate such phenomena and appraising a wide range of objects and archival documents--from furnishings, appliances, architectural blueprints, and maps to photographs, films, TV series, novels, artworks, scrapbooks, work-logs, personal letters and reports--this book highlights the significance of private life in social, economic, and political contexts of modern Iran.Tackling the subject of home from a variety of perspectives, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran thus shows the interplay between local aspirations, foreign influences, gender roles, consumer culture and women's education as they intersect with taste, fashion, domestic architecture and interior design.