This is an exceptional and important book. Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling. Anderson leavens his sweeping and complex chronicle with rich character portraits.
A sweeping, gripping book, one that makes past times and dead people (often weird, complex and evil) spring to life with its narrative verve and attention to detail ... Riveting ... Compelling.
War correspondent, novelist and journalist Anderson brilliantly tells this tale of greed, paranoia and hubris from four perspectives: the Tehran court and the US state department, both wilfully blind to the street and paralysed by policy inertia; Khomeini’s circle of naive revolutionaries; and one American who did see it coming, but whose sounding of the alarm was ignored.
A good and worthwhile account of his undoing, even if part of the subtitle...promises more than it delivers. It amply demonstrates the ways in which the shah was the author of his own downfall ... Anderson’s book suffers, in a way so many accounts by American writers seem to do, from concentrating on the Iran-US relationship to the virtual exclusion of any other... But he has interviewed some of the key people, including the genuinely tragic figure of the shahbanu, Farah Pahlavi.
Nothing if not timely ... Readers of this book shouldn’t expect insights into the causes, course and consequences of the revolution, but rather an account of the impotence and confusion of the shah’s patron, the United States, as it unfolded.
