It's an account of the hostage crisis, the FIRST account, and should be taken at face value.
While one might give a very low rating to the Islamic Republic's human rights record, Mrs. Ebtekar's book should be ranked on a different criteria. I give it five for it's value and importance in the academic realm.
She also explains, in considerable detail, how the mullahs came to see (with the eager complicity of the international media and its own western political agendas) these students as a vanguard of their own theocracy, rather than of the much broader cultural revolution which had ousted the the regime of Shah Pahlevi, installed through a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1953.
In February of 2000, a month before Madeleine Albright?s admission of the previously secret C.I.A. involvement in this 1953 coup, Iran initiated a series of run-off elections to its parliament. To date, 70% of the candidates elected have been characterised by the Western media as "moderates," among them, like Ebtekar, students who took over the American Embassy in 1979. These moderates, like the current president Khatami, all ran on a platform of breaking the stranglehold the mullahs have maintained on politics since 1979, and establishing an open civil society within the Islamic state of Iran.
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the rapidly proliferating international phenomenon of peoples attempting to preserve their independence and culture from the overwhelming hegemony of American dominance in the global community of nations, and in how the "independent" American media continues to play an active, no matter how innocent and unwitting, role as an instrument of American foreign policy.