Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran
10 best books like Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran (Christiane Bird): Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran, Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey, Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran, Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel, Jasmine and Fire: A Bittersweet Year in Beirut, The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, The Soul of Iran: A Nation's Struggle for Freedom, Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran
| Author | Afschineh Latifi |
| ISBN | 0060745347 |
At the age of ten, a young Iranian girl witnesses the horror of her father's execution and escapes the revolution with her sister.
Growing up in Tehran in the 1970s, Afschineh Latifi and her sister and two brothers enjoyed a life of luxury and privilege. Their father, a self–made man, had worked...
Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey
| Author | Alison Wearing |
| ISBN | 0312263449 |
With a love of travel, Alison Wearing invites us to journey with her to Iran--a country that few Westerners have a chance to see. Traveling with a male friend, in the guise of a couple on their honeymoon, Wearing set out on her own at every available opportunity. She went looking for what lay beneath the...
Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran
Highly memorable description of the lives of ordinary people in 21st century Iran. I have a memory like a sieve so it says a great deal about this book that I remember so much even though I read it 5 or so years ago. It left a huge impression on me. Every time I hear or read about Iran, I remember that ordinary...
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran
| Author | Christopher De Bellaigue |
| ISBN | 0060935367 |
The history of Iran in the late twentieth century is a chronicle of religious fervor and violent change -- from the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah in favor of a rigid fundamentalist government to the bloody eight-year war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. But what happened to the hostage-takers,...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
| Author | Salma Abdelnour |
| ISBN | 0307885941 |
As Beirut exploded with the bombs and violence of a ruthless civil war in the ’80s, a nine-year-old Salma Abdelnour and her family fled Lebanon to start a new life in the States. Ever since then— even as she built a thriving career as a food and travel writer in New York City—Salma has had a hunch that...
The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China
| Author | Rosemary Mahoney |
| ISBN | 0618035494 |
One year before the protests in Tiananmen Square, Rosemary Mahoney participated in a teaching exchange between Harvard and Hangzhou University. At Hangzhou she was able to overcome her students' usual rigidity and achieve a rare and intimate glimpse of their culture and their attitudes. This remarkable...
Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity
| Author | Afsaneh Najmabadi |
| ISBN | 0520242637 |
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi...
The Soul of Iran: A Nation's Struggle for Freedom
| Author | Afshin Molavi |
| ISBN | 0393325970 |
Iran thundered onto the world stage in 1979 with an Islamic revolution that shook the world. Today that revolution has gone astray, a popular democracy movement boldly challenges authority, and young Iranians are more interested in moving to America than in chanting "Death to America." Afshin Molavi,...
Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
| Author | Elaine Sciolino |
| ISBN | 0743284798 |
The book that revealed Iran to the West, now with a new Afterword. Elaine Sciolino updates Persian Mirrors to include coverage of the 2005 presidential election in Iran.
As a correspondent for Newsweek and The New York Times, Sciolino has had more experience covering revolutionary Iran than any...
Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
| Author | Roya Hakakian |
| ISBN | 0609810308 |
From the Hardcover
“We stormed every classroom, inscribed our slogans on the blackboard . . . Never had mayhem brought more peace. All our lives we had been taught the virtues of behaving, and now we were discovering the importance of misbehaving. Too much fear had tainted our days. Too many...
To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America
| Author | Tara Bahrampour |
| ISBN | 0520223543 |
A compelling and intimate exploration of the complexity of a bicultural immigrant experience, To See and See Again traces three generations of an Iranian (and Iranian-American) family undergoing a century of change--from the author's grandfather, a feudal lord with two wives; to her father, a freespirited...
Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran
| Author | Fatemeh Keshavarz |
| ISBN | 0807831093 |
In a direct, frank, and intimate exploration of Iranian literature and society, scholar, teacher, and poet Fatemeh Keshavarz challenges popular perceptions of Iran as a society bereft of vitality and joy. Her fresh perspective on present-day Iran provides a rare insight into this rich culture alive...
My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran
| Author | Haleh Esfandiari |
| ISBN | 0061583278 |
My Prison, My Home is the harrowing true story of Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari’s arrest on false charges and subsequent incarceration in Evin Prison, the most notorious penitentiary in Ahmadinejad’s Iran. Esfandiari’s riveting, deeply personal, and illuminating first-person...
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
| Author | Hooman Majd |
| ISBN | 0385523343 |
A revealing look at Iran by an American journalist with an insider’s access behind Persian walls
The grandson of an eminent ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat, now an American citizen, Hooman Majd is, in a way, both 100 percent Iranian and 100 percent American, combining an insider’s...
One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage
| Author | Michael Wolfe |
| ISBN | 0802135994 |
The pilgrimage to Mecca, or the Hajj, is a journey all Muslims are enjoined to make once in their lifetimes. Its purpose is to detach human beings from their homes and, by bringing them to Islam's birthplace, to emphasize the equality of all people before God. Since its inception in the seventh century,...
Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran
A love story and a reporter's first draft of history, Honeymoon in Tehran is a stirring, trenchant, and deeply personal chronicle of two years in the maelstrom of Iranian life.
Azadeh Moaveni, Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of President Mahmoud...
We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs
| Author | Nasrin Alavi |
| ISBN | 1933368055 |
In September 2001, a young Iranian journalist, Hossein Derakhshan, created one of the first weblogs in Farsi. When he also devised a simple how-to-blog guide for Iranians, it unleashed a torrent of hitherto unheard opinions. There are now 64,000 blogs in Farsi, and Nasrin Alavi has painstakingly...
The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation
| Author | Sandra Mackey |
| ISBN | 0452275636 |
The Iranians explores Iran in the context of its old and complex culture, for throughout its history Iran has struggled with two warring identities-one evolving from the values, social organization, and arts of ancient Persia, the other from Islam. By examining the relationship between these two...
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?: A Memoir
| Author | David Harris-Gershon |
| ISBN | 1851689966 |
David Harris-Gershon and his wife, Jamie, moved to Jerusalem full of hope. Then, mere days after Israel thwarted historic cease-fire negotiations among the Palestinians, a bomb ripped open Hebrew University’s cafeteria. Jamie’s body was sliced with shrapnel; the friends sitting next to her...
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
| Author | Neil MacFarquhar |
| ISBN | 1586486357 |
Since his boyhood in Qadhafi's Libya, Neil MacFarquhar has developed a counterintuitive sense that the Middle East, despite all the bloodshed in its recent history, is a place of warmth, humanity, and generous eccentricity.In this book, he introduces a cross-section of unsung, dynamic men and women...
Saved by Beauty: Adventures of an American Romantic in Iran
| Author | Roger Housden |
| ISBN | 0307587738 |
Roger Housden traveled to Iran to meet with artists, writers, film makers and religious scholars who embody the long Iranian tradition of humanism, the belief in scholarship and artistry that began with the reign of Cyrus the Great. He traveled to the mountains of Kurdistan to learn from Sufis, whose...
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs & Israelis 1956-78
| Author | Kai Bird |
| ISBN | 1416544402 |
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER KAI BIRD’S fascinating memoir of his early years spent in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon provides an original and illuminating perspective into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Weeks before the Suez War of 1956, four-year-old Kai Bird, son of a garrulous,...
