Had an interesting day. Started off with a breakfast talk by Marina Nemat on her book Prisoner of Tehran. Actually sat next to her for breakfast before the talk and had a chance to chat about politics and life in the middle east and Canada. Very warm, funny, and approachable but with a horrific story to tell.
From Booklist
In Tehran in the early 1980s, after she leads a strike in high school to get her math teacher to teach calculus not politics, Marina, 16, a practicing Catholic, is locked up for two years and tortured with her school friends in the Ayatollah Khomeini's notorious Evin political prison. She is saved from execution by an interrogator, Ali, who wants to marry her and threatens to hurt her family and Catholic boyfriend, Andre, if she refuses. Forced to convert to Islam, she becomes Ali's wife; then he is assassinated by political rivals, and she rejoins her family and marries Andre. They immigrate to Canada in 1991. For more than 20 years, secure in her middle-class life, she keeps silent, until she writes this unforgettable memoir. Haunted by her lost friends and by her betrayal of them, Nemat tells her story without messages and with no sense of heroism. The quiet, direct narrative moves back and forth from Toronto to Nemat's childhood under the shah's brutal regime and, later, during the terror under Khomeini. Despite the rabid politics and terrifying drama, the most memorable aspect of the story is the portrait of Ali, Nemat's savior, in love with her, so kind to her--Does he kill people when he goes off to work in the prison each day? Her comment that she wishes "the world were a simple place where people were either good or evil" is as haunting as her guilt and love. When she asks Andre to forgive her long silence, he asks her to forgive his not asking. Hazel Rochman
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Then, on the way out of the talk at the Palliser, had the opportunity to see the Dali Lama walk past. A bunch of members of the Tibetan community were also present... when the Dali Lama walked into the room a tremendous happiness and calm washed over everyone. He walked past, shaking hands with a lineup of Tibetans when he stopped, turned, and bowed to me in the crowd of onlookers. Incredible experience.
http://www.amazon.com/Prisoner-Tehran-Womans-Survival-Iranian/dp/1416537430/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254757062&sr=8-1
