Click on image to buy from Amazon.ComA deeply researched portrait of Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, this biography extracts the personality of the last shah of Iran from the royal grandiosity in which he lived. Milani describes him as timid, prone to vacillation, and prey to conspiracy theories, perhaps not ideal traits in an absolute monarch who initiated a modernizing revolution from above, only to be dethroned in 1979 by social forces his authoritarian policies had unleashed. Recounting the shah’s childhood, Milani underscores how closely he was supervised by his father, a military officer who had seized the throne in 1925.
In a 1941 political crisis that resulted in young Mohammad’s ascension, the 1953 coup against the Mossadegh government, and the 1978–79 revolution, Milani depicts the shah as fretful, indecisive, and obsessed with detail, extensively citing British and American diplomatic reports about him. The shah’s private life, which included three wives, alleged mistresses, and extravagances in palaces and other riches, is effectively depicted. With sympathy born of a compassion for someone in over his head, Milani’s meticulous amassing of facts establishes a base for readers to form their own opinions. –Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
The Los Angeles Times Book Review – February 20, 2011 (Excerpt)
It was uncanny to read the closing chapters of this splendidly detailed biography of the last shah of Iran while tumultuous and jubilant crowds in Egypt drove Hosni Mubarak from power.The parallels were so close they seemed to come out of some fanciful fiction.
Like Mubarak, the shah—in power for 37 years—was blinded by a megalomania and a thirst for power that isolated him from the needs and demands of his people. Like Mubarak, the shah, spurning the advice of others, refused to initiate reforms until it was too late to satisfy his critics. Like Mubarak, the shah, who fled Iran in 1979, had maintained a facade of strength and stability that lulled the United States into believing that the iron-clad strength of its Middle Eastern ally was in no danger of cracking.
But the biographer Abbas Milani, the head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, is not trying to depict the life and downfall of the shah as a model for political upheavals in the Middle East. [Read the full article...]
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The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar
A Novel by Philip Katz
“Imperator – The Life of Gaius Julius Caesar” by Philip Katz is a fictional recreation of the life of the greatest of all Romans, Gaius Julius Caesar. It is a personal memoir, the inside story of his world as viewed through his eyes, written in the first person, suppressed by Caesar’s successors, only to be rediscovered in modern times. [More...]
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