Saved by Beauty: Adventures of an American Romantic in Iran - Hardcover

                                    SAVED BY BEAUTY

ADVENTURES OF AN AMERICAN ROMANTIC IN IRAN

 

     PUBLICATION DATE: MAY 17TH 2011. BROADWAY BOOKS

 

Roger Housden's new book is a lyrical and also searing account of two months he spent in Iran in early 2009. His intent was to find the human and creative face of an ancient culture that has been branded part of the "axis of evil."

 

He found what he was looking for, and more. He met artists, writers, film makers and religious scholars who embodied the long Iranian tradition of humanism that began with the reign of Cyrus the Great in 550.BC. He met Sufis in the mountains of Kurdistan whose version of Islam exhorted nothing but tolerance and love. He met people everywhere who would recite the poetry of Hafez or Rumi at the slightest opportunity, including even the intelligence agents who took him away for questioning as he was about to leave the country.

 

For in the end, Housden encountered the darkness as well as the beauty of this complex and extraordinary country. After 36 hours of interrogation, he was given the choice of five years in Evin Prison or becoming an agent on behalf of the Iranian Security Services. He was brought face to face with the reality that beauty and truth, deceit and violence, are inextricably mingled in the affairs of human life.

 

Saved By Beauty weaves a story of many threads. It is a deeply poetic and perceptive appreciation of a culture that has survived for three thousand years. It portrays creative and spiritual layers in contemporary Iran that are rarely given any mention in the West. It is a spy story that reflects on the philosophical and aesthetic questions of good and evil, truth and beauty. And finally, it is the story of a man in his sixties on a personal search for the images and archetypes of a legendary Iran that filled his imagination in his twenties.

 

Housden's book is a pilgrimage, a prayer, a heartfelt reminder, a poet-traveler's window into the eternal soul of Iran. Join him.

 

Jack Kornfield. Best-selling author of A Path With Heart, and After The Ecstasy, The Laundry.

ROGER HOUSDEN is the author of some twenty books, including the best-selling Ten Poems series and the novella Chasing Rumi. English by birth, he has been a writer for the Guardian and an interviewer for the BBC. Housden emigrated to the States in 1998 and now lives in the Bay Area. Visit himat www.rogerhousden.com