About this item
The untold story of generations of Middle Eastern freedom fighters - horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse - and their efforts to defend their homelands from the Taliban and others seeking to destroy them.. Book of Queens reaches back centuries to the Persian Empire and a woman disguised as a man, facing an invading army, protected only by light armor and the stallion she sat astride. Mahdavi draws a thread from past to present: from her fearless Iranian grandmother, who guided survivors of domestic violence to independent mountain colonies in Afghanistan where the women, led by a general named Mina, became their country's first line of defense from marauding warlords. To the female warriors who helped train and breed the horses used by US Green Berets when they touched down in October 2001, with a mission but insufficient intelligence on the ground - women whose contributions were then forgotten.
About the Author
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD is associate professor and chair of anthropology. director of the Pacific Basin Institute and dean of women at Pomona College. Her research interests include gendered labor, migration, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. She is the author of four books: her first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution was published with Stanford University Press in 2008, and her second book, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and 'Human Trafficking' in Dubai, also Stanford University Press, was published in 2011. Mahdavi's third book, entitled From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem was published by Routledge on October 1, 2013, and her fourth book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives also Stanford University Press was published in April 2016.Pardis was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the Asia Society, and has received fellowships and awards from institutions such as Google Ideas, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Drug Research Institute, the American Public Health Association, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. She has consulted for a wide array of organizations including the U.S. government, Google Inc., and the United Nations. In 2012, she won the Wig Award for teaching at Pomona College.
