Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran's 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price

Afsaneh Moqadam

May 2010 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Johnny Heller

About this audiobook

Tehran, June 12, 2009. Mohsen Abbaspour, an ordinary young man in his twenties-not particularly political, or ambitious, or worldly-casts the first vote of his life in Iran's tenth presidential election. Fed up with rising unemployment and inflation, he backs the reformist party and its candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mohsen believes his vote will count. It will not. Almost the instant the polls close, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will declare himself president by an overwhelming majority. And as the Western world scrambles to make sense of the brazenly fraudulent election, Mohsen, along with his friends and family and neighbors, will experience a sense of utter desolation, and then something else: an increasingly sharper feeling-the beginning of anger. In a matter of weeks, millions of Iranians will flow into the streets, chanting in protest, "Death to the dictator!" Mohsen Abbaspour will be swept up in an uncontrollable and ultimately devastating chain of events. Like Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and Ryszard Kapuscinski's incisive reportage, Death to the Dictator! stuns listeners with its heartbreaking immediacy. Our pseudonymous author was a keen eyewitness in Tehran during the summer of 2009 and beyond. In this brave and true book, we see what we are not supposed to see and learn what we are not supposed to know.

About the author

Afsaneh Moqadam is the pseudonym of the author of Death to the Dictator!

Johnny Heller, a Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award winner, has recorded over 800 audiobooks spanning every genre. He is a four-time Audie Award winner, an AudioFile Best Voice, and the winner of over thirty Earphones Awards. AudioFile magazine named him one of the top fifty voices of the twentieth century.