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Remarkable prose; each word, each sentence seems to have been thought-out over days or nights. Some reviewers have complained that this is half fiction, the same complaints one hear people make against Naipaul's non-fiction. Even if this wasn't the case, just look at the beauty of the prose, the length and the power of sentences here; each drop of fuel provides a kick. The insight is remarkable. But then, my dear fellows, please just read it for its beauty (nothing is perfect you know. Bask in the moonlight, and not point out the dark spots)Kaps once remarked of his own work: It's literature on foot, he said.
The Shah was a murderer, we learn, and this is what brought about the Iranian revolution. The author's literary interviews are uniform in voice, sounding more and more like the author himself and less like the people he says he interviewed. I liked this little book, although I was glad it is short. One should keep this in mind when considering the fury of the Islamic nationalism that threatens peace in the Middle East. As with his rather famous reportorial piece on Heile Selassie, who was, I guess, far less sadistic than this tyrant, the author goes in for a kind of incantatory style, without historical background or research, just rambling monologues. What emerges finally is a clear picture of a Soviet-style cruelty, a totalitarian-style torture machine that sought to crush the opposition. The Shah was so bad that anything was thought better and only the religious leaders in exile had the loyalty of the people; it was they who had called for the ouster of the Shah, so their return has to be seen like de Gaulle's famous return to Paris after the Nazis were defeated. All of this is made clear by the author and its message strikes me as highly relevant to the political crisis of our time.
Modern Islam is built on its petroleum reserves, on the sense of divine favor that petroleum wealth confers.B. 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. 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. "Shah of Shahs" is an extreme example of Kapuscinski's indirection; it starts out as a collection of snapshots - literally. 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. A. His writing is too graceful to be merely what it seems.
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. 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. 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. The late Shah's SAVAK made Tamerlane, Vlad the Impaler, and the Spanish Inquisition look like pussycats.G. The "American Century" -- actually a half century at best -- ended with the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi.C. the first 'chapters' are labeled 'Daguerrotypes - innoucuous impressions at most.
The world is no longer an Anglophone sea.F. Any Iranian who didn't celebrate the fall of the Shah was obviously on the Shah's payroll of clientage.H. 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. It's well worth reading today and it will continue to be a source for historians long into the future.
Never did like this book. Was to graphic and details of things that happened that I didn't need to know about.
I read this book twice both in Persian & English and found lots of historical errors in the book such as claims that PM Mossadeq was democratically elected back in 1950s which is totally wrong. PM Mossadeq was APPOINTED as PM by the King of Iran, Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1950 and when ordered to quit, the Shah had to execute a UK-US backed coup against him. Errors like that are enormous in this book.
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