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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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