Review by Booklist Review
Perhaps lost in the mists of history, under the shah of Iran's 38-year reign (1941--79), as veteran journalist Anderson explains, per capita income in that country increased twentyfold, the literacy rate quintupled, the average lifespan increased from 27 to 56 years, freedoms for women surpassed those found elsewhere in the Islamic world, protections were granted to the country's minorities, and the country emerged as an economic and military powerhouse. Yet as Anderson lays out with meticulous reporting and consummate storytelling, many of Iran's spectacular gains--and along with them, its once-inviolable alliance with the U.S.--came undone with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini. Delusional might best describe both sides before the denouement: the shah for his obscenely lavish lifestyle and willful distancing from the lives of everyday Iranians, and the U.S. for the paltry effort it made, given its massive financial and military investment, to maintain its ties to the Iranian people. For example, as late as 1978, the State Department's DC-based Iran desk comprised just two secretaries and an intern, the author reports. Though the Iranian Revolution unfolded more than 45 years ago, the now-fraught U.S.-Iran relationship remains front and center, and there are still hard-won lessons to glean about the costs of inattention.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chaos is strewn by foolhardy leaders acting on bad information in this riveting history of the Iranian revolution from journalist Anderson (The Quiet Americans). The book centers on Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who presented himself as the grand successor of conquering Persian emperors of the past. In fact, he was a stiff political naïf (Anderson describes him in his youth as a "tense, taut little boy") and Eurocentric dilettante who squandered Iran's "gold rush" of oil revenues on wasteful military hardware and corruption-riddled public projects, and who was eager to prove himself to the U.S., which had used the CIA to overthrow his nationalist rival Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. By the late 1970s, economic malaise had compounded the simmering resentments of both leftist intellectuals and Islamic extremists led by exiled Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, all of whom saw the Shah as a cat's paw for America. Anderson's story builds a rushing momentum as one miscalculation after another hurtles the country toward the 1979 "revolution few saw coming and no one knew how to stop." The result is an illuminating, operatic depiction of the revolution as a farcical cavalcade of arrogant mistakes with dire consequences. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thoroughgoing history of the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rise of the Islamist theocracy in Iraq. Shah Reza Pahlavi, notes journalist and historian Anderson, met with seven American presidents over his long reign. When the last, Jimmy Carter, took office, the Shah had reason to worry, since Carter had run on a clean-government, pro--human rights platform. "Both these promises," Anderson writes, "cast an uncomfortable spotlight on Iran." At the time, Islamist protest was rising in the Shah's realm, and with it demonstrations by outlawed leftist groups; when the Shah arrived in Washington, D.C., more than 4,000 Iranians, mostly in the latter camp, greeted him in protest. The Shah proved ineffectual in suppressing the growing rebellion and tried to mollify some critics, even though he was warned to do something: As Anderson documents, "the more dovish State Department felt it was vital that his program of political reforms continue while he sought to restore order"--but Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, "felt that order should be reestablished first" and urged a crackdown. Although there were some high-profile victims of political intrigue, including a middle-aged son of the then-exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shah's regime was comparatively light-handed: Whereas the government of the Islamic Republic that overthrew the Shah recorded that the regime had killed 60,000 Iranians, an investigative committee "arrived at the remarkably precise figure of 2,781." Not bad, measured against the Islamists, who killed 5,000 leftists in a single week during a purge of 1988, as well as thousands more Iranians executed in the first years of Khomeini's government. It's ironic that the U.S., in Cold War mode, bet on the wrong horse, subverting the leftists while "a Red Iran probably would have been far preferable to the Iran they got." An eye-opening history of how Iran became a point on the "axis of evil" and is considered such a dangerous enemy today. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
