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Hooman Majd, acclaimed journalist and New York-residing grandson of an Ayatollah, has a unique perspective on his Iranian homeland. In this vivid, warm and humorous insider's account, he opens our eyes to an Iran that few people see, meeting opium-smoking clerics, women cab drivers and sartorially challenged presidential officials, among others. Revealing a country where both t-shirt wearing teenagers and religious martyrs express pride in their Persian origins, that is deeply religious yet highly cosmopolitan, authoritarian yet reformist, this is the one book you should read to understand Iran and Iranians today.
With U.S.–Iran relations at a thirty-year low, Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd dared to take his young family on a year-long sojourn in Tehran. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay traces their domestic adventures and closely tracks the political drama of a terrible year for Iran's government. It was an annus horribilis for Iran's Supreme Leader. The Green Movement had been crushed, but the regime was on edge, anxious lest democratic protests resurge. International sanctions were dragging down the economy while talk of war with the West grew. Hooman Majd was there for all of it. A new father at age fifty, he decided to take his blonde, blue-eyed Midwestern yoga instructor w...
What happens when you move to Iran, heartland of the 'Axis of Evil', with your family in tow? - asks Hooman Majd, author of the acclaimed The Ayatollah Begs to Differ and The Ayatollah's Democracy "Welcome to Iran," he said. "This isn't Switzerland." We have an idea of the texture of life in Paris or Rome, but what is the texture of life like in Tehran? How do you get a driving license? Or secure an account with a discreet and reputable liquor dealer? And how on earth do you explain to an official that your son was indeed born just a month after your marriage? In The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, Hooman Majd introduces us to the daily delights and challenges of life in the so...
"One of America's most astute revealers of Iranian culture and identity."-Reza Aslan, The Atlantic
By 2013, Iranians were suffocating, as though the streets had become narrower, the buildings taller, the dirty air thicker. In electing Hassan Rouhani, they chose a new, reformist leader, burying the days when a Holocaust-denying president had pushed Iran to the edge of economic collapse and conflict. But the nation hasn’t quite broken free. Iranians are trying to move on, yet the Islamic Republic remains a prisoner of the past, plagued by US sanctions, a broken economy and the threat of war. After 2016, Donald Trump’s presidency derailed the future of millions of people. How have Iranians met these challenges? What future do they imagine now? Has Iran missed its best chance for real change? Crooked Alleys explores Iran during some of its darkest days, but also its most hopeful.
Selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times In recent times, the United States and Iran have seemed closer to war than peace, but that is not where their story began. When America was in its infancy, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams turned to the history of the Persian Empire as they looked for guidance on how to run their new country. And in the following century, Iranian newspapers heralded America as an ideal that their own government might someday emulate. How, then, did the two nations become the adversaries that they are today? In this rich, fascinating history, John Ghazvinian traces the complex story of America and Iran over three centuries. Drawi...
This beautiful photographic collection is a celebration of modern menswear. In it, photographer Jamie Ferguson profiles men from the fashion industry, covering a range of ages, geographical locations and personal styles. Each of the men profiled works in menswear, but enjoys passions of his own. Tommaso Capozzoli (Sales Director) is also a rower who belongs to an exclusive club whose headquarters sit below the Ponte Vecchio in Florence; Hooman Majd is a world renowned Iranian-American journalist and author; Michael Hill is the founder and creative genius behind Drake's haberdashery in London, New York, Seoul and Tokyo, Simon Crompton is a keen cyclist, and Antonio Ciongoli a gifted skateboarder. This Guy captures not only their impeccable style from London, Paris, New York, Stockholm, Tokyo and Rome but also the lives that made them. Full of aspirational life stories, beautiful photography, and cutting-edge fashion, This Guy is the perfect luxury coffee-table book for anyone who appreciates the finer things in life.
"A decade in the writing, the haunting story of a son's quest to understand the mystery of his father's death--a universal memoir about the secrets families keep and the role they play in making us who we are. Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was...
Three Americans captured by Iranian forces and held in captivity for years reveal, for the first time, the full story of their imprisonment and fight for freedom.
BONUS: This edition contains a Honeymoon in Tehran discussion guide. Azadeh Moaveni, longtime Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, returns to Iran to cover the rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Living and working in Tehran, she finds a nation that openly yearns for freedom and contact with the West but whose economic grievances and nationalist spirit find an outlet in Ahmadinejad’s strident pronouncements. And then the unexpected happens: Azadeh falls in love with a young Iranian man and decides to get married and start a family in Tehran. Suddenly, she finds herself navigating an altogether different side of Iranian life. As women are arrested for “immodest dress” and the authorities unleash a campaign of intimidation against journalists, Azadeh is forced to make the hard decision that her family’s future lies outside Iran. Powerful and poignant, Honeymoon in Tehran is the harrowing story of a young woman’s tenuous life in a country she thought she could change.