Best of
Iran

2012

Solacers


Arion Golmakani - 2012
    The first child of a heartless father and a discarded mother is left to fend for himself on the streets of Mashhad, seeking food and shelter wherever he can. His lonely early years are an unbelievable tale of cruelty and betrayal on the part of nearly everyone who might be expected to help, save for one aunt who does her best to keep him from starving.But living a harsh and solitary existence has one advantage for this little boy: other than forcing him to be self-reliant, no one attempts to indoctrinate him on rural Iranian society's archaic cultural values and religious beliefs. And so he never accepts his wretched state as fate, choosing instead to dream big dreams about getting an education, having his own family, and starting a new life – possibly in the faraway land called America. He makes a plan and by the age of 17 he boards a plane to the land of possibilities, where his dreams eventually also take flight.

The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran


David Crist - 2012
    It is a conflict that has never been acknowledged and a story that has never been told.This surreptitious war began with the Iranian revolution and simmers today inside Iraq and in the Persian Gulf. Fights rage in the shadows, between the CIA and its network of spies and Iran's intelligence agency. Battles are fought at sea with Iranians in small speedboats attacking Western oil tankers. This conflict has frustrated five American presidents, divided administrations, and repeatedly threatened to bring the two nations into open warfare. It is a story of shocking miscalculations, bitter debates, hidden casualties, boldness, and betrayal.A senior historian for the federal government with unparalleled access to senior officials and key documents of several U.S. administrations, Crist has spent more than ten years researching and writing The Twilight War, and he breaks new ground on virtually every page. Crist describes the series of secret negotiations between Iran and the United States after 9/11, culminating in Iran's proposal for a grand bargain for peace-which the Bush administration turned down. He documents the clandestine counterattack Iran launched after America's 2003 invasion of Iraq, in which thousands of soldiers disguised as reporters, tourists, pilgrims, and aid workers toiled to change the government in Baghdad and undercut American attempts to pacify the Iraqi insurgency. And he reveals in vivid detail for the first time a number of important stories of military and intelligence operations by both sides, both successes and failures, and their typically unexpected consequences.Much has changed in the world since 1979, but Iran and America remain each other's biggest national security nightmares. "The Iran problem" is a razor-sharp briar patch that has claimed its sixth presidential victim in Barack Obama and his administration. The Twilight War adds vital new depth to our understanding of this acute dilemma it is also a thrillingly engrossing read, animated by a healthy irony about human failings in the fog of not-quite war.

Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: Marina Nemat's Memoirs


Marina Nemat - 2012
    At a time when most Western teenaged girls are choosing their prom dresses, Nemat was having her feet beaten by men with cables and listening to gunshots as her friends were being executed. She survived only because one of the guards fell in love with her and threatened to arrest her parents if she refused to marry him. Soon after her forced conversion to Islam and marriage, her husband was assassinated by rival factions. Nemat was returned to prison but, ironically, it was her captor’s family who eventually secured her release.An extraordinary tale of faith and survival, Prisoner of Tehran is a testament to the power of love in the face of evil and injustice.After TehranIn After Tehran, her powerful second memoir, Marina Nemat tells of her battle to regain her voice and recounts how much her life has changed since the publication of her internationally bestselling memoir, Prisoner of Tehran.Settling into a new life as immigrants, Nemat and her husband find jobs, raise their two children, and seemingly adapt. But inwardly, she is struggling with the effects of the torture and imprisonment she endured in Iran as a teenager. Haunted by survivor’s guilt, she feels compelled to speak out about what happened to her in prison, but no one seems willing to listen, not even her family. As her account becomes a bestselling book, Nemat’s life begins to change again.A story of courage and recovery, After Tehran chronicles Nemat’s confrontation with her past, telling how she re-engages with her distant father, and how she ultimately emerges from the emotional ravages of post-traumatic stress.

Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State


David Patrikarakos - 2012
    There is little real understanding of Iran's nuclear program, in particular its history, which is now over fifty years old. This groundbreaking book, unprecedented in its scope, argues that the history of Iran's nuclear program and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked; only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the program's beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the book details the US's central role in the birth of nuclear Iran and, through the relationship between the program's founder and the Shah of Iran himself, the role that weapons have played in the program since the beginning. David Patrikarakos's unique access to "the father" of Iran's nuclear program, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and Western officials at the center of today's negotiations, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment program that lies at the heart of global concerns.

Persian Art and Architecture


Henri Stierlin - 2012
    When the ancient landof Persia was conquered by the Arabs, its people embraced Islam but strovealso to retain their own language and culture. The merging of influencesresulted in a distinctive artistic style that spread through the Middle East.This book follows a historical path across the Iranian world and examinesthe artistic legacies of great rulers and their dynasties, from the rebirth ofPersian art under the Seljuqs to the magnificent structures built by Timur-iLang in Samarqand and the cultural flowering that occurred under the Safaviddynasty and beyond. Palaces, mosques, madrasas, and mausoleums display amesmerizing decorative complexity, with form and ornament combining tocreate an indivisible whole. Spectacular polychrome tiles, intricate brickwork,curling arabesque motifs, and calligraphic inscriptions attain a transcendentbeauty, designed to reflect both the temporal power of the rulers who commissionedthem and the heavenly glory of creation.

The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism


Patricia Crone - 2012
    The book also describes a complex of religious ideas that, however varied in space and unstable over time, has demonstrated a remarkable persistence in Iran across a period of two millennia. The central thesis is that this complex of ideas has been endemic to the mountain population of Iran and occasionally become epidemic with major consequences for the country, most strikingly in the revolts examined here, and in the rise of the Safavids who imposed Shi'ism on Iran. This learned and engaging book by one of the most influential scholars of early Islamic history casts entirely new light on the nature of religion in pre-Islamic Iran, and on the persistence of Iranian religious beliefs both outside and inside Islam after the Arab conquest.

Bunting's Persia


Basil Bunting - 2012
    Bunting, who is widely regarded as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century, proved unusual in his deep and abiding interest in Middle Eastern culture. Here, he renders poetry of remarkable tonal and emotional range in characteristically clear and resolute language.“Reading Bunting’s translations, I am struck again by how fresh and strong they are, how vivid in their feeling, and how he digs into the spirit of the originals—a kind of passionate excavation work.”—Dick Davis, translator of The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings

The Iranian Scorpion


William Peace - 2012
    With the help of Kate Conway, a freelance journalist, and Vizier Ashraf, a shadowy Taliban leader, Robert is disguised as an opium field hand. In Helmand Province he learns the secrets of the Afghan drug trade, and illegally enters Iran with his "boss" and a fifteen-year-old chemist. The principal buyer is known as The Scorpion. A sale of 25 kg of heroin is completed and traced to New York City, where a bust is made. Furious, The Scorpion orders Robert captured and executed. Robert's father, General David Dawson, is in Tehran on assignment with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigating Iran's use of nuclear energy. Learning of Robert's reported execution, he vows to assassinate The Scorpion, who is also a provincial governor of Iran. Intrigue and surprise dominate the conclusion of the fascinating story The Iranian Scorpion. William Peace is a retired business executive and management consultant. He is American, is married to an Italian chef, has traveled widely, and lives in London. This is his fourth novel. Publisher's website: http: //sbpra.com/WilliamPeace

Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire, 525-332 BCE


Stephen Ruzicka - 2012
    Despite its status as the largest of all ancient Persian military enterprises--including any aimed atGreece--this conflict has never been reconstructed in any detailed and comprehensive way. Thus, Trouble in the West adds tremendously to our understanding of Persian imperial affairs. At the same time, it dramatically revises our understanding of eastern Mediterranean and Aegean affairs by linkingPersian dealings with Greeks and other peoples in the west to Persia's fundamental, ongoing Egyptian concerns. In this study, Stephen Ruzicka argues that Persia's Egyptian problem and, conversely, Egypt's Persian problem, were much more important in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean worlds thanour conventional Greek-centered perspective and sources have allowed us to see. In looking at this conflict as one stage in an enduring east-west conflict between successive Near Eastern imperial powers and Egypt--one which stretched across nearly the whole of ancient history--it represents animportant turning point: by pulling in remote western states and peoples, who subsequently became masters of Egypt, western opposition to Near Eastern power was sustained right up to the 7th century Arab conquests. For classicists and historians of the ancient Near East, Trouble in the West willserve as a valuable, and long-overdue, resource.

Divan of Sadi


Saadi - 2012
    Translation & Introduction Paul Smith. Published by New Humanity Books/Book Heaven Sadi of Shiraz (1210-1291), a contemporary of Rumi who influenced him, was another Perfect Master Poet who expressed himself in the ruba'i form as well as hundreds of ghazals in his beautiful Divan that often also contained images from dervish dancing. Sadi was a great traveller who spent forty years on the road throughout the Middle-East, North Africa and India and many of the incidents he experienced he wrote down in his two most famous works when he finally returned to his beloved birth-place... The Rose Garden (Gulistan) and The Orchard (Bustan). Sadi's mystical love poetry, his ghazals, although almost unknown in the West, are loved by his fellow-countrymen almost as much as those of Hafiz whom he greatly influenced. Here for the first time in English they can be read in all their beauty and power and spirit. The correct rhyme-structure has been kept as well as the beauty and meaning of these beautiful, mystical poems. ALL of the wonderful 603 ghazals from Sadi's Badayi and Tayyibat have been translated in clear, modern, meaningful, correct-rhyming English. Introduction on The Life of Sadi, his Poetry and his influence on the East and the West and on the form and meaning of the ghazal. 421 pages. COMMENTS ON PAUL SMITH'S TRANSLATION OF HAFIZ'S 'DIVAN'. "It is not a joke... the English version of ALL the ghazals of Hafiz is a great feat and of paramount importance. I am astonished. If he comes to Iran I will kiss the fingertips that wrote such a masterpiece inspired by the Creator of all." Dr. Mir Mohammad Taghavi (Dr. of Literature) Tehran. "Superb translations. 99% Hafiz 1% Paul Smith." Ali Akbar Shapurzman, translator of many mystical works in English into Persian and knower of Hafiz's Divan off by heart. "Smith has probably put together the greatest collection of literary facts and history concerning Hafiz." Daniel Ladinsky (Penguin Books author). Paul Smith is a poet, author and translator of over 80 books of Sufi poets of the Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, Pashtu and other languages... including Hafiz, Sadi, Nizami, Rumi, 'Attar, Sana'i, Jahan Khatun, Obeyd Zakani, Mu'in, Amir Khusrau, Nesimi, Kabir, Anvari, Ansari, Jami, Omar Khayyam, Rudaki, Yunus Emre and many others, as well as his own poetry, fiction, plays, biographies, children's books and screenplays.

Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe


Naghmeh Sohrabi - 2012
    Yet travelogues can reveal much more than the customs of a foreign land; they can also serve as a window into the culture and concerns of their place of origin. Drawing on a series of travel narratives by Iranian visitors to Europe in the nineteenth century, Taken for Wonder illustrates how these writings reflect the complicated political agendas of diplomats, merchants, kings, and others during the Qajar Dynasty. Using texts that correspond to four monarchic reigns in this period, the book shifts the traditional framework of analysis from the act of travel to that of writing travel. Hayratnamah (The Book of Wonder), an Iranian ambassador's account of his visit to the court of King George III, provides the first example. Sohrabi's reading reveals a narrative calculated to reinforce the grandeur and stability of the Qajars to its Persian readers rather than merely recount the lifestyle of the English court. Similarly, the political motives at work in Mirza Fattah Khan Garmrudi's accounts of his European journey are explored in light of Britain's 1837 occupation of Iran. A subsequent chapter considers the ways Nasir al-Din Shah, the longest reigning Qajar monarch, viewed his European travelogues as a tool for domestic politics and international diplomacy. The study concludes with two travel accounts by non-government officials, demonstrating how the genre became a mode for critiquing the Qajar Dynasty and instigating political reform at the close of the nineteenth century.

The Transmission of the Avesta


Alberto Cantera - 2012
    

Iranian-Russian Encounters: Empires and Revolutions Since 1800


Stephanie Cronin - 2012
    This book explores the myriad dimensions of the Iranian-Russian encounter during a dramatic period which saw both Iran and Russia subject to revolutionary upheavals and transformed from multinational dynastic empires typical of the nineteenth century to modernizing, authoritarian states typical of the twentieth. The collection provides a fresh perspective on traditional preoccupations of international relations: wars and diplomacy, the hostility of opposing nationalisms, the Russian imperial menace in the nineteenth century and the Soviet threat in the twentieth. Going beyond the traditional, this book examines subaltern as well as elite relations and combines a cultural, social and intellectual dimension with the political and diplomatic. In doing so the book seeks to construct a new discourse which contests the notion of an implacable enmity between Iran and RussiaBringing together leading scholars in the field, this book demonstrates extensive use of family archives, Iranian, Russian and Caucasian travelogues and memoirs, and newly available archives in both Iran and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Providing essential background to current international tensions, this book will be of particular use to students and scholars with an interest in the Middle East and Russia.