King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation

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.)