King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

The American perception of the Iranian Revolution started, for many, with the seizing of the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That's where this book ends. The apparently sudden collapse of the Shah of Iran's 38-year reign surprised nearly everyone—including many who helped topple him—but Anderson recounts with wry detail the particular ignorance of two participants: the pampered Shah, isolated by yes-men, and the entire American establishment, led by Nixon and Kissinger and then Carter and Brzezinski, who, drunk on oil, military revenues, and the Cold War, clung to the Shah's ship as it went down. His story is least complete—aside from the fascinating figure of the Westernized Khomeini confidant Ebrahim Yazdi—in its portrait of the third crucial element: the revolutionaries themselves, a portrait relevant once again as their own reign—now longer than the Shah's—is faced with another wave of revolutionary upheaval in the streets.