'King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution' by Scott Anderson

"It's an event that ranks among the most seminal in history," said in The Wall Street Journal , and yet the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 left behind questions that have "tormented historians" ever since. The uprising that toppled the U.S.-backed shah and installed a brutal anti-Western autocratic Islamist regime at the heart of the Middle East unfolded quickly, taking U.S. leaders by surprise. Suddenly, the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was gone, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an elderly religious fundamentalist, had returned from exile to seize control of a country that in the past three and a half decades had seen a dramatic rise in per capita income, life expectancy, and women's rights. Scott Anderson's "sweeping, grippi

See Full Page