The daughter of a once-powerful and wealthy shazdeh or prince Sattareh was raised in the 1920s and 30s in a Persian harem compound in Tehran with numerous mothers more than thirty brothers and sisters and nearly a thousand servants. Here the despotic but enlightened Shazdeh educated his daughters as well as his sons preparing them for the political turmoil he feared would arise when he was gone. As a young woman Sattareh broke with stern Moslem tradition to journey alone across Iran India and the Pacific in wartime to reach America where she became the first Persian to study at the University of Southern California and earned an advanced degree in social work. Fired by a vision of lifting her people out of backwardness and poverty she returned to Iran and founded the Tehran School of Social Work. For twenty years Sattareh her students and her graduates waged a heroic war on poverty disease and overcrowding that made her famous. Then soon after the collapse of the Shahs regime she found herself at Ayatollah Khomeinis headquarters arrested as a counter-revolutionary and facing possible execution. This remarkable recounting of her compelling story and final flight from her homeland opens a dramatic window on Irans journey through the twentieth century. --cover 1st ed. hbk.
