Description
One Woman’s Struggle in Iran: A Prison Memoir by Nasrin Parvaz
In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned home to Iran from England, where she had been studying, and became a member of a socialist party in Iran fighting for a non-Islamic state in which women had the same rights as men. Three years later, at the age of twenty-three, she was betrayed by a comrade and arrested by the regime’s secret police.
Nasrin spent the next eight years in Iran’s prison system. She was systematically tortured, threatened with execution, starved and forced to live in appalling, horribly overcrowded conditions. One Woman’s Struggle is both an account of what happened to her during those eight years and evidence that her spirit was never broken. Nasrin’s memoir is a story of friendship and mutual support, of how women drew strength from one another and found endless small ways to show kindness and even find tiny specks of joy.
This book, however, is not simply about the prison system in Iran. It is about oppression – and especially the oppression of women – wherever it takes place. It deserves to stand with Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man as an indictment of cruelty, brutality and the dehumanizing of fellow human beings.
– Catriona Troth, author of Gift of the Raven and Ghost Town.
Nasrin Parvaz
David Wagoner –
Some things have to b e said. Some books have to be written. Draw back the curtain on human rights. Nasrin takes you into the deepest darkest holes,where no light reaches, but where human rights are ripped away and the brave fight to give the world the greatest gift.