Driven by Iranians' dreams of social justice and political freedom, the 1979 revolution toppled the shah's rickety and repressive monarchy. But in his place, the leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, and his followers built a system that served his narrow Islamic fundamentalist faction, and exacerbated all the failures and brutality of the Shah's reign. In this groundbreaking new book, award-winning journalists Bazergamhar Sharafuddin and Yeghaneh Tarabati tell the intertwined stories of six Iranians, offering a powerful new perspective on Iran's modern history with allhis bitter twists and his stubborn hope.
- Mehdi Karroubi \* : A follower of Khomeini, he rose to the highest ranks of power on the wave of the revolution, before being expelled from its inner circle.
- Hila Siddiqui \* : A young activist, expressed through her poetry the hopes of her peers during the years of reform, and eventually immortalized their shattered dreams.
- Amir Moghaddam \ : an ambitious government bureaucrat, who witnessed corruption and bribery on a scale that pushed him to take enormous risks to uncover the truth.\ Saeed Rahmani \* : A successful global tech entrepreneur who returned to Iran to spark a boom in startups in his home country, and faced a harsh security state that wanted his company for itself.
