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The Life and Times of the Shah by Gholam Reza Afkhami
(University of California Press, £24.95)
Towards the end of Gholam Reza Afkhami’s new biography of Iran’s last Shah, he describes the deposed monarch—in exile after the Iranian revolution of 1979—undergoing chemotherapy in the Bahamas. Mohammad Reza Shah, we learn, became increasingly depressed; he took little interest in his surroundings and was often “drowned” in his own thoughts, “trying to reason out why things had gone so unexpectedly wrong.”
Afkhami, who served as Iran’s deputy minister of the interior under the Shah, writes well and makes use of interviews with many significant actors in the history of the Shah’s reign—much of which is quite new. One example is the testimony of Shaban Jafari “Bimokh” (literally, “the brainless”): a bazaar gang leader who had been thought previously to have been a significant figure in the street demonstrations that brought down Prime Minister Mossadeq in 1953, but who seems on his own testimony to have been in jail at the crucial juncture. Afkhami covers all of the important events and personalities, and adds many personal touches. But his account also has some flaws, and tends to favour description and narrative over analysis. And like the Shah in exile, the reader ends up with no clear or satisfying explanation for why the monarchy fell.
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