Her book, Not Without My Daughter, is an account of her experiences in 1984–86, when she left Alpena, Michigan to go to Iran with her husband and daughter for what she was promised would be a short visit. After years of marriage and a beautiful child together, Betty agrees to travel with her husband to Iran to visit his family. However, this book was written in retrospect and her bias against Islam is glaring and I kept getting frustrated with some of her depictions in the book.

You can argue about how negative and stereotyping this book is, how it helped to reinforce generalized preconceptions about the Iranians, how it didn’t help to provide a better and more accurate picture of the Iranian society to the an already-hostile American public, how it was used by a sector of the American public and media who would happily jump on anything like this, how it was used by both sides as a political propaganda tool, etc. Mother and daughter became prisoners of an alien culture, hostages of an increasingly tyrannical and violent man.At the time, my dad was living and working in Mexico as a surgeon, which meant that every other weekend found my brother and I listlessly cooped up in my dad’s clinic in Zaragoza, a very poor community on the outskirts of Juarez.

During their escape several people put themselves in harms way, possibly even in a position where they could be killed for helping Ms.I wish that I'd written this review the many years ago when I read this book, but even though time has muted the details, my memory of this book's effect is still vivid. If that weren't reason enough, Mahmoody had a proven agenda in writing this book with Hoffer, and the fact that it was published in the United States so soon after the hostage crisis, when public opinion was already so turned against Iran, also points to a monetary agenda as well as a political one. It's hard to believe Betty Mahmoody and her daughter survived their ordeal, but with Mahmoody's fierce persistence, they did. Not Without My Daughter' Subject Grows Up, Tells Her Own Story "Not Without My Daughter" told the story of an American mother and daughter fleeing Iran.

I think this was my first introduction to the middle east and what it was like to be a woman in their culture. Betty tried to get help from Moody's family, but they approved of Moody's actions and refused to help.Was she being disingenuous regarding the circumstances surrounding her departure from the United States and about the length of her stay in Iran? In December, two weeks after the dinner party, Rasheed informed Betty that the smuggler was unwilling to take a woman and a child on the journey over the mountains into Turkey, especially during the winter. Take Norma Khoury's "autobiographical" book, "Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan," which purports to be a first-hand account by an Arab woman. She made many friends, and even among her in-laws there were those who were sympathetic to her plight. I would like to mention that I have never met any Iranians that are anything like Betty’s former in-laws, but doesn’t mean that they’re not out there.