Maziar Bahari left London in June 2009 to cover Iran’s contested presidential elections for Newsweek magazine. He thought he’d be returning in just a few days to Paola, his pregnant fiancée. Instead, he was incarcerated under false charges of espionage in Iran’s most notorious prison. His release came four months later, only after a global campaign supported by Hillary Clinton. While suffering regular beatings, forced confessions, and threats of execution, Bahari draws strength from the experiences of his family in the past: his father was imprisoned by the shah in the 1950s, and his sister by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. Exposing the contradictions at the heart of Ahmadinejad’s paranoid regime, this inspiring and often witty story of one family’s courage in the face of repression is also a beautifully written portrait of modern Iran.
