Flight of the Patriot: Escape from Revolutionary Iran [Hardcover]

Yadi Sharifirad (Author)

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Product Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Thomas Allen; First Edition edition (April 1 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0887625266
ISBN-13: 978-0887625268
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm
Shipping Weight: 567 g

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #169,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Quill & Quire

When the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, he promised freedom from the tyranny of the Shah of Iran. For many Iranians, such as Yadi Sharifirad, Khomeini merely replaced one gang of infamous torturers with another.

The Flight of the Patriot is Sharifirad’s own story of how a rural tailor’s son became a celebrated war hero, only to find himself accused of being the worst kind of traitor in the new Iran: an American spy. After his release from an almost year-long prison ordeal marked by repeated episodes of torture, he begins to plot his family’s escape to Canada (with its “cowboys and snow”), where his wife has family.

This memoir is a fascinating and often chilling read. When Sharifirad’s fighter plane is shot down during the Iran-Iraq War, his life is saved by a band of Iraqi Kurds who put him in an open coffin atop a mule and spirit him across the border. After his wife and youngest children successfully make it to Vancouver, followed by his eldest son, Sharifirad spends years trying to outwit the authorities before he hires a smuggler to guide him across the dangerous Iranian-Turkish border to freedom (only to struggle once more to get all the right papers so he can travel to Canada as a refugee).

For all the pain that Sharifirad suffers, there is a lightness to the way he tells his story. He quotes the giants of Persian literature and often jumps from one memory to another. He even recounts his “other” autobiography – the one he was forced to write again and again in prison for his interrogators.

There are places where The Flight of the Patriot feels uneven and slightly repetitive. But the author’s rendering of his experience is deeply emotional and heartbreaking.

Book Description

This is a gripping, page-turning memoir of a US-trained Iranian fighter pilot who flew in the Shah of Iran’s and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s air force.

Sharifirad was shot down in the Iraqi-Iranian war in the early 1990s. Saved by a group of local Kurds, he returned to Iran where he became a national hero. A movie, called Eagles, based on his rescue, was made in Iran in 1984. Sharifirad’s story was also published in Iran in a book called Crash on the Fortieth Mission. Shortly after his return to Iran, the Ayatollah sent him to Pakistan as military attaché. When he returned toTeheran, he was accused of being a CIA spy and was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. Sharifirad served a prison term and upon his release, despite constant surveillance, managed to smuggle his family out of the country. Eventually, he too managed a harrowing escape from Iran via Turkey to Canada, where he now lives with his family in Vancouver.

The book also provides an absorbing historical and cultural backdrop to Iran.

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