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One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran
by Haleh Esfandiari
At the Ministry of Intelligence in Tehran, a man in a checkered shirt sits down in an easy chair. He removes several documents from his pocket and hands one to Haleh Esfandiari, a sixty-seven-year-old Iranian American grandmother he has interrogated and detained for what seems to be an endless number of weeks. This is your arrest warrant and we are taking you to Evin Prison," he says.
This stunning arrest was the culmination of a chain of events set into motion in the early-morning hours of December 31, 2006—a day that began like any other but presaged the end of Esfandiari's regular visits to her elderly mother in Iran, and her return to the United States. That morning, the driver arrived on time. Her mother held the Quran over her head for blessing and luck. From the car, Haleh waved good-bye. She checked for her passport and plane ticket. But as the taxi neared the airport, a sedan forced them to pull over. Three men, armed with knives, threatened her and her driver while going through her pockets and stealing her belongings—including her travel documents. She was left unharmed but would not fly home to the States that day. An ordinary robbery," Esfandiari insisted to friends and family. She took steps to secure a new passport and book a new flight. But it would not be until eight months later that she would leave Iran.
Esfandiari became the victim of the far-fetched belief on the part of Iran's Intelligence Ministry that she, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., was part of an American conspiracy for "regime change" in Iran. In haunting prose and vivid detail, Esfandiari recounts how the Intelligence Ministry subsequently ordered a search of her mother's apartment; put her through hours, then weeks, of interrogation; tapped her phone calls, forcing her to speak in code to her husband and mother; and finally detained her at the notorious Evin Prison, where she would spend 105 days in solitary confinement.
Through her ordeal, Esfandiari came face-to-face with the state of affairs between Iran and the United States—and witnessed firsthand how fear and paranoia could create a government that would take her captive. Weaving her personal story of capture and release with her extensive knowledge of Iran, My Prison, My Home is at once a mesmerizing story of survival and a clear-eyed portrait of Iran today and how it came to be.
"In this engaging memoir, Esfandiari weaves together strands of her family and professional life, the problematic and complex history of American-Iranian relations, along with a reasoned eyewitness account of being held as a political prisoner." - Publishers Weekly
"Though the author left her home country after the 1979 revolution, the details of her incarceration shed light on the continued troubling aspects of this regime." - Kirkus Reviews
"Esfandiari's account of her incarceration in Tehran, her perseverance and finally freedom has wider universal implications...We need to return time and again to the question she so poignantly poses at the end of her account.: "I owe my freedom to those who took up my cause. What of others?'" - Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
"A masterful memoir...an intimate tale of bravery in the face of ignorance set against the larger tragedy of U.S.-Iran relations. Esfandiari's story-timely, suspenseful and artfully told-will fascinate experts and general readers alike." - Madeleine K. Albright, U.S. Secretary of State, 1997-2001
This information about My Prison, My Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Haleh Esfandiari is a distinguished Iranian American public intellectual. The founding director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program, she is the former deputy secretary general of the Women's Organization of Iran and has taught at Princeton University. She has worked in Iran as a journalist and is the author of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Shaul Bakhash, a professor at George Mason University.
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