King of KingsKing of Kings

On New Year's Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, extolling Iran as an island of stability due to your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you. Twelve and a half months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind? The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator oblivious to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The shah emerges as a fascinating Shakespearean character--a wannabe Richard III unaware of the depth of dissent to his rule, and at the end Lear-like as he raged against his fate. The Americans made terrible decisions at almost every juncture, from dismissing reports from the one diplomat who saw how hated the shah was by the Iranian people, to Jimmy Carter allowing the shah to come to America for medical treatment, which set off the hostage crisis that forever damaged American influence in the world. Anderson tells this astonishing tale with the narrative brio and keen analysis that made his bestselling Lawrence of Arabia one of the key texts in understanding the modern Middle East. Based on voluminous research and dozens of interviews, King of Kings is driven by penetrating portraits of the people involved. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe and now in the United States, the hatred of economically marginalized, religiously fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval--and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.
"A stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism"--