My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran »

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.

On December 31, 2006, sixty-seven-year-old scholar and grandmother Haleh Esfandiari was on her way home to the United States from Iran when she became the victim of a far-fetched conspiracy theory. On the suspicion that she was part of an American plot to bring “regime change” to Iran, the Intelligence Ministry detained, interrogated, and eventually arrested her. For the next 105 days, she lived in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin Prison. Weaving together memories of her childhood in Iran, her story of capture and release, and her extensive knowledge of her homeland, 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.

The Washington Post - Lisa Bonos

As you read Haleh Esfandiari's memoir of imprisonment in Iran, it's easy to lose track of time, both because her compelling tale draws you in and because similar situations are still playing out in her home country…Esfandiari's travails have been well documented…newspapers around the world closely covered her case and editorialized for her release. But My Prison, My Home goes well beyond the headlines by deftly weaving personal narrative with a political history of modern Iran.