THIRD PARTY EVENT Iran today: Let the Swords Encircle Me

Based on more than thirty extended reporting trips by Scott Peterson to Iran, including the turbulent aftermath of the disputed June 2009 election, Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran – A Journey Behind the Headlines is the definitive guide to this enigmatic nation, from the roots of its incendiary internal struggles to the rise and slide of Iran’s earthshaking 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“Deeply researched, fair-minded, and scrupulous, Scott Peterson’s Let the Swords Encircle Me is foreign-correspondent journalism at its highest level.”

    —Alan Furst, author of Spies of the Balkans and The Foreign Correspondent

“With a superb journalist’s sense of narrative and a scholar’s mastery of the subject, Scott Peterson gives us a searing insight into one of the most complex, mysterious, and dangerous regimes on earth.”

    —William Shawcross, author of The Shah’s Last Ride

Peterson gives voice to Iranians themselves – the clerics and the reformers, the filmmakers and the journalists, the True Believers and their Westernized and profane brethren – to understand the complexities of Iran today. He shows how every word, image, and sensibility in Iran is often deliciously unexpected. Ideology matters. So does “resistance.” And azadi: freedom.

Scott Peterson is the Istanbul Bureau Chief for The Christian Science Monitor and a photographer for Getty Images, whose journeys have crossed three continents for 22 years, to tell powerful human stories in war zones from Somalia and Rwanda (Me Against My Brother) to Afghanistan and Iraq. He will show photographs from Iran and speak about his new book.

Chairing the discussion will be Lindsey Hilsum, the well-traveled and well-decorated International Editor for Channel 4 News, whose own reporting on Iran has always broken new ground.