Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
Booklist Review: In Tehran in the early 1980s, after she leads a strike in high school to get her math teacher to teach calculus not politics, Marina, 16, a practicing Catholic, is locked up for two years and tortured with her school friends in the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious Evin political prison. She is saved from execution by an interrogator, Ali, who wants to marry her and threatens to hurt her family and Catholic boyfriend, Andre, if she refuses. Forced to convert to Islam, she becomes Ali's wife; then he is assassinated by political rivals, and she rejoins her family and marries Andre. They immigrate to Canada in 1991. For more than 20 years, secure in her middle-class life, she keeps silent, until she writes this unforgettable memoir.
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3 comments:
I would highly recommend this memoir for Read Across RI. Appropriate for all ages and of interest to both genders. Provides excellent insight on living in an extreme fanatic society. Also, provides different perspective for people who are very anti-US involvement in the middle east. Accessible (obtained on intra-library loan).
I especially liked the author's ability to convey the odd, confused emotion of how a victim can have some sort of love for the victimizer while at the same time fighting for her freedom--And then this is juxtaposed with the victimizer's twisted sort of love for his victim so that you can empathize with both to some degree and realize that in the oftentimes strange world that we live in, the victimizer is himself, sadly, a victim of a different kind. This book is interesting, accessible and well-written, dealing with a topic that is less known in our society and that in one way or another is ongoing and overlooked in other countries today.
I would Highly recommend this Book It has given me an insight in to a culture most people know little about one of the best books I have ever read.
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