A stimulating biography and a thorough examination of the makeup of an entire nation.
An incisive portrait of a deeply riven man and his country.
A deep knowledge of Iranian history, especially about the key role the United States has played in its internal affairs since World War II, informs this meaty biography by Iranian-American historian Milani (Iranian Studies/Stanford Univ.). Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s desire to render Iran a modern nation in the Western model by authoritarian rule rather than through the democratic process infused many of his decisions during his 37-year reign, and proved ultimately disastrous. A shy boy suddenly thrust into the spotlight by his father, who muscled out the long-reigning Turkish dynasty of the Qajars and proclaimed himself king of Iran in 1925, Mohammad Reza was only seven years old when he became Crown Prince of the Peacock Throne. Once cocooned by his religious mother, now schooled in the discipline of a soldier, he was sent away to boarding school in Switzerland to become a polished European gentleman. He returned to a country in the throes of modernization and enriched by oil revenues. However, his father’s inadequacy in handling the Nazis and the Soviets prompted the British to force his abdication in favor of his son in 1941. For Pahlavi, the episode seemed to have “internalized the idea that big powers, particularly Britain, Russia and America, could do anything in Iran,” and he weathered the fraught next decade, navigating between the demands of the oil-hungry Western states, the nationalists gaining ascendancy and the Communists, all the while keeping peace with the mullahs. The regime’s clash with the reactionary forces led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1963 set the stage for the revolution to come. Thrice-married, increasingly isolated in the world, criticized for the practices of his state-security intelligence agency (SAVAK) and suffering from cancer, the Shah had turned his country into his “virtual private fiefdom” by the time he was forced into exile in 1979.
A stimulating biography and a thorough examination of the makeup of an entire nation.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4039-7193-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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