A. Modern Islam is built on its petroleum reserves, on the sense of divine favor that petroleum wealth confers.
B. The "American Century" -- actually a half century at best -- ended with the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi.
C. Everything that has happened in Iran since 1954 is an extended consequence of the CIA overthrow of Mossadegh, the worst mistake in the history of American diplomacy. At least, that's how Iranians and most of the rest of the world interpret history.
D. Recovery of sane social and political norms in Iran will eventually depend on the legacy of respect for Mossadegh and his brief era of democracy.
E. The world is no longer an Anglophone sea.
F. The late Shah's SAVAK made Tamerlane, Vlad the Impaler, and the Spanish Inquisition look like pussycats.
G. Any Iranian who didn't celebrate the fall of the Shah was obviously on the Shah's payroll of clientage.
H. Revolution, however justified and even salubrious, seldom or never brings out the best human qualities of the victors.
If any of these premises seem unfounded or offensive, don't lambaste me! I'm just the reviewer, and these are my clumsily simplified extrapolations of Ryszard Kapuscinski's nuanced impressions, supposedly written on scraps in his hotel room in Teheran in 1980, at the end of Jimmy Carter's ineptitude but before Ronald Reagan's consummate covert idiocy.
Kapuscinski was too subtle and artful an essayist ever to have been an ordinary journalist. His writing is too graceful to be merely what it seems. "Shah of Shahs" is an extreme example of Kapuscinski's indirection; it starts out as a collection of snapshots - literally! the first 'chapters' are labeled 'Daguerrotypes - innoucuous impressions at most. As you read on, however, amused by the author's wit, the intensity of Kapuscinski's awed recognition of the significance of the Islamic Revolution builds and builds. Perhaps only an observer like Kapuscinski - an outsider to both sides of everything, a Pole, a man who traveled with Herodotus in his pocket of memory - could have written such a report, placing what he saw first hand the day before in the context of all recorded history. This book was written before the worst days of the Iran-Iraq War and the repression that has occurred under the clerical autocracy, but it is not dated. It's well worth reading today and it will continue to be a source for historians long into the future.
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- Arvind BadrinarayananReviewed in India on September 16, 2013
Fast, brilliant prose, insightful and extremely readable!
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Great read, great style
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