Waking Up in Tehran: Love & War in Revolutionary Iran

A firsthand, personal account of the Iranian Revolution, this story is told by an American who first traveled there as a human rights investigator, and married an Iranian activist. Waking Up in Tehran explores the overthrow of the Shah’s dictatorship and its replacement with an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, chronicling the events whereby an unwanted theocracy replaced an unwanted monarchy. It recounts the brutality of the violent, bloody crackdown by the Ayatollahs against the ongoing democratic opposition, including the author’s own arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. Throughout these years, she was in the midst of the Iranian revolution, providing inside glimpses of ongoing turmoil and antitheocracy rebellion. Joining a growing resistance movement—hundreds of thousands in the streets who protested against the Islamic transformation of education, culture, and political life—she and her husband navigated a personal minefield of surveillance and family intrigue. Through direct observation and engagement with a wide spectrum of Iranians at various levels of Iranian culture, the author pieces together what was really happening: how and why the Islamic Republic had been created—and by whom.