Eight decades, told plainly
He was born in Tabriz to a devout, nearly bankrupt father and a young mother who gave him the yolk of her own breakfast egg so he would grow strong. He grew up as Soviet planes circled the city, worked in the bazaar to feed his family, and slipped past armed checkpoints to reach Tehran — where he passed the medical entrance exam and joined the army to afford the degree.
What follows is a doctor’s life in a country that kept changing beneath him: running a laboratory with almost nothing, operating on a board in a village hut, serving as the only surgeon in a snowbound frontier hospital, and watching the Shah’s Iran give way to revolution.
It is also the story of a marriage and family — the joy of love, and of the grief that followed. Honest, often funny, and unsparing about his own choices, A Journey Through Life is a rare first-hand account of twentieth-century Iran from someone who lived every page of it.