Book News
Jailed journalist to write memoir.
A journalist jailed for four months in Iran on charges of espionage has a book deal.
Iranian-American Roxana Saberi, 32, is working on a memoir that HarperCollins will publish in March. Saberi’s book, untitled, will tell of her arrest in January, her initial sentence of eight years in prison and her release in May after being granted a two-year suspended sentence.
According to a statement from HarperCollins, the memoir also will be “a penetrating look at Iranian society and culture — based on six years of research and interviews with Iranians across the society — and its political tensions that have sparked debate across the globe.”
In a case that outraged human rights activists, Saberi was convicted of spying for the United States in a closed- door trial that her Iranian-born father said lasted only 15 minutes.
Raised in Fargo, N.D., and a former Miss North Dakota, Saberi spent six years in Iran as a freelance journalist for the BBC and other news organizations.
Iranian authorities accused her initially of working without press credentials, but later leveled the far more serious charge of spying.
The Associated Press
First Lines
The Crying Tree, by Naseem Rakha
The death warrant arrived that morning, packaged in a large white envelope marked confidential and addressed to Tab Mason, Superintendent, Oregon State Penitentiary. Mason had been warned the order might be coming. A couple of weeks earlier, the Cook County DA had let the word slip that after 19 years on death row, condemned murderer Daniel Joseph Robbin had stopped his appeals.
Mason dropped the envelope on his desk, along with a file about as thick as his fist, then ran his hand over the top of his cleanly shaved skull. He’d been in corrections for 20 years — Illinois, Louisiana, Florida — and on execution detail a half-dozen occasions, but he’d never been in charge of the actual procedure. Those other times he’d simply walked the guy into the room, strapped him down, opened the blinds on the witness booth, then stood back and waited. He’d worked with one guy in Florida who’d done the job 50 times. “It become routine,” the officer told Mason, who was busy puking into a trash can after witnessing his first execution.
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