Secrets of Ordinary Heroes: The Multi-Generational Odyssey of an Iranian-Jewish Family and Their Esc

What will a family endure to ensure its survival?

What will parents risk to save their children? And how will those children cope with unimaginable hardships?

In The Secrets of Ordinary Heroes, Dr. Ray Tabibiazar answers these hard questions. Born a Jew in Iran, Tabibiazar and his family were marked for death when the Ayatollah's revolution pushed them to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war. Risking everything, they fled on foot over the Zagros Mountains to Turkey. But they soon found themselves plunged in the middle of another bloody conflict-Israel's First Intifada-before emigrating to America, where they eventually found refuge.

While set against the backdrop of revolution, war, and other brutal conflicts, the story centers on parents struggling to raise their children and teach them about life and death, love and hate, fear, greed, education, betrayal, happiness, and-perhaps most supreme-the importance of family. Their journey highlights the strength, fortitude, courage, and ingenuity that immigrants continue to bring to America.

Readers of The Kite Runner and The Escape Artist will love The Secrets of Ordinary Heroes. By turns, the memoir is spell-binding, heart-wrenching, deeply-affecting, often raw, sometimes funny, but always painstakingly honest. It's also the first written book by an Iranian-Jewish physician that offers a unique, inside view of the Islamic Revolution, whose leaders, even today, continue to oppress their own citizens and influence world politics.