'A Modern Contagion'

"I mainly wrote this book because I saw a gap in the historiography of the country," Amir Afkhami told Hollywood on the Potomac at a book party in his honor at the Kalorama home of Juleanna Glover and Christopher Reiter in Washington, DC. "This is a story that wasn't told. It was a story with a lot of implications in understanding what's going on in contemporary Middle East, both in terms of the Shiite-Sunni conflict that's going on and a lot of the public health issues that are going on, such as the cholera epdicemic in Yemen, the substance abuse problem in Iran and some issues tied [to] the roots of the 1979 Iranian revolution." He thought the book: A Modern Contagion needed to be written to inform how we understand all of the seminal events in what's on in the Middle East today. His reading audience is made up of mainly historians, public health specialists, policymakers and people who are interested in the rgeion in general. And of course us, the lay people, who find navigating the landscape of Iranian and the Middle East culture and politcis to be as they say on Facebook: It's complicated.