MixedTimes Literary Supplement (TLS)The characters are immense, the issues vast and multidimensional ... Scott Anderson brings something fresh to the party: the engaging, lively style of a journalist-novelist ... However, the story is so large and unwieldy that Anderson loses focus on the Shah, who begins to recede into the background, replaced, unfortunately in my view, by an emphasis on the American or Americanized characters ... The early chapters work well. Anderson is particularly effective at portraying the Shah as the complicated and not entirely unsympathetic man that he was ... All good, gripping stuff. It is, after all, a great story, and these are great characters ... But increasingly the book feels like a television series, not real history. Everything is too tidy, shaped by artificial drama ... The last chapters are movingly written.
