Barely two weeks into 1979. Iran's Shahanshah, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, fled his country—which was then in the final throes of a revolution led by an austere anti-Western theocrat known as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Following an 18-month hegira that took him through a half dozen nations, the Shah died of cancer. Shawcross (Sideshow, The Quality of Mercy) here offers an engrossing narrative that combines an affecting journal of the deposed monarch's last days with informed perspectives on the events preceding his banishment. By the author's account, the Shah never really understood the reasons for the collapse of his government, which had been both corrupted and sustained by the availability of immense oil revenues. Nor did he grasp that the fidelity of sometime allies was to Iran and its strategic values rather than to his person. At any rate, when the Shah was driven into exile, precious few states were willing to grant him hospitality, let alone asylum. Only Anwar Sadat proved steadfast as the Shah and his dwindling entourage shuttled through Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the US, and Panama, then back to a rendezvous with death in Cairo. As a practical matter, countries reluctant to provide the itinerant Shah a haven had legitimate cause for concern. Soon after Washington allowed him entry for medical treatment, Islamic militants occupied the American embassy in Teheran and held the diplomatic personnel trapped there as hostages for well over a year. At the end, the forlorn Shah paid a high personal price for his regime's autocratic misrule and pretensions. When hounded from the Peacock Throne, he was already suffering with the cancer that would ultimately take his life. As Shawcross makes abundantly clear, though, the Shah's treatment at the hands of eminent, ego-tripping physicians of variant nationalities was the medical equivalent of opera bouffe. While he endured his ordeal with stoicism, even grace, the Shah's plight was longer on pathos than tragedy. Shawcross provides more clinical detail than most readers may care to know on precisely what ailed the Shah. This quibble apart, he offers a brilliantly allusive portrait of an overthrown sovereign adrift in a world of failed loyalties.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1988
ISBN: 067168745X
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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