The Unknown Life of the Shah [Import] [Hardcover]

AMIR TAHERI (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: HUTCHINSON (1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0091748607
• ISBN-13: 978-0091748609
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,640,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Amir Taheri was born in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, and educated in Tehran London and Paris. He joined Kayhan International, Tehran's English daily newspaper in 1968 as an opera critic and then cultural correspondent. A year later he was appointed Diplomatic Correspondent and in 1971 became the paper's Political Editor.
In 1972 he was appointed Executive Editor-in-Chief of the Persian language daily Kayhan, Iran's largest newspaper, a post he held until the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Since then he has edited a number of newspapers and magazines in France and Britain and contributed to many leading publications in Europe, the United States and the Middle East. His columns are published by many newspapers across the globe.
In four decades of journalism, Taheri has interviewed many of the world's political leaders and cultural and artistic icons. He has also published 11 books on Islam, Iran, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East.
Taheri was a member of the Executive Board of the Institute for International Political and Economic Studies (IIPES)for four years during which he helped organise a number of seminars on the Persian Gulf and Iran's political developments.
Taheri was a member of the Executive Board of the International Press Institute (IPI) for eight years and a campiagner for press freedom across the globe. He also served on the Executive Board of the Reporters sans Frontieres for three years. He has been a Senior Fellow at the National Committee for American Foreign Policy (NCAFP) since 2002 and Director of its Middle East Project.
Over the past two decades Taheri has emerged as a leading participant in the debate taking place within the world of Islam. A frequent traveler to Muslim countries, Taheri has lectured in many universities, research institutes and political and cultural clubs, offering his ideas for reforming Islam and helping it come to terms with modernity.
Since 1982, Taheri has lived in Paris and London, with frequent and at times lengthy visits to the Middle East.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More poignant than a Greek tragedy, September 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Unknown Life of the Shah (Hardcover)

Forget about politics and strategy. This is the story of a man caught in a whirlwind of history. The story is told with as much pathos as a Greek tragedy. In fact, it is more poignant than a Greek tragedy because we know that what happens here happens to a real man made of flesh and blood, majestic and yet fragile as we all are. This is a love story within a love story within a love story. It is the story of he boundless love that the Shah had for Iran as he imagined it to be. This is also the story of the love that the Shah's wife, Farah Diba, who was half his age , had for him regardless of his many well publicised infidelities. It is also a story of betrayals. The Shah betrayed his bond with his people by becoming arrogant and aloof. His people betrayed him by dragging him in the mud and using him as a scapegoat to atone for their own sins. The United States and the Shah's other allies betrayed him as soon as they realised that he was being forced to bow out of the stage of history. The author tells the story with the pace of a thriller. Start the book and you shall not be able to put it down until the last page is turned. A Reader, Brighton, UK

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THIS BOOK MAKES YOU LIKE THE SHAH, April 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Unknown Life of the Shah (Hardcover)

Like most people exposed to the conventional view of Iran in the past decades I always regarded the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi as a brutal tyrant installed in Tehran by the United States to act as a policeman of the Persian Gulf.
That view had been propagated most intensely by our own liberals in the West who have always hated anyone who was with us while adoring anyone who was not. For example, they vilified the Shah of Iran but praised Fidel Castro as a revolutionary icon. In the early stages of the Islamic revolution, they also adored Khomeini and tried to market him as a kind of " pope-philosopher" attunded to his people's culture.
In " The Unknown Life of the Shah", Amir Taheri, an expatriate Iranian journalist and author,tries to present a fair and balanced portrait of the Shah.
This, of course, is no easy task. There is so much anti-Shah propaganda material around that no one could deal with them in a single book.
Taheri seems to have decided to ignore all the adverse propaganda material and , instead, concentrates on his narrative of the Shah's stormy life.
He bases himself on archives, copious notes that he took while working as a journalist in Iran (including two four-hour long interviews with the Shah himself), and interviews with over 100 people who knew the late monarch at different stages of his life.
The result is an authoritative biography that reads almost like a thriller.In it one gets a glimpse of the Iranian reality through the life of one man.
Taheri is by no means uncritical of the Shah and his book is not a panegyric. He shows how the Shah sunk into megalomania towards the end of his reign, taking himself for the saviour of th Free World. The Shah even created a special committee, of which Henry Kissinger was a member, to protect the Free World against Communism in the 1970s. The author also hints at the Shah's philandering, without goingin to salacious details that could have damaged the digjity of the book. There is also enough reference to corruption which had become a major problem in the last eyars of the reign. ( Although it was not as widespread as anti-Shah elements claimed at the time.)
Taheri is also critical of the Shah for having encouraged Islamist radicals as a means of weakening his own middle-class liberal orelftist opponents. In a sense, Khomeini was a direct product of the Shah's almost obsessive hatred of the left.
I have two difficulties with this book, however- hence the decision to give it only four stars.
The first is the author's focus on ther Shah's foreign policy rather than the domestic policies that ultimately mattered. Is this, perhaps, because many Iranians, as the author notes, firmly believe that the fate of their country is decided elsewhere? I would have liked more on the Shah's land reform ( was it genuine or not?) and his economic policy whch, to me at least and as Taheri himself hints, appears more socialistic than anything else.
The second problem I have is that the author does not dwell much on the many men and some women who helped the Shah rule so unruly a nation as Iran. As Bertolt Brecht said once: even Casear must havehad someone to make him soup when he was crossing the Rhine.
The author does bring in Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, the Shah's longest serving prime minister, Princess Ashraf, the Shah's twin sister, and , of course, Empress Farah, the Shah's last and logest-lasting of three wives. But I think those three, and many others such as the flamboyant ambassador Ardeshir Zahedi, would have merited greater attention.
All in all, however, this book makes you like the Shah. And that is a feat-considering the bitter campaign conducted against him for almost 40 years, especially an the height of the Cold War when he was the favorite target of the Soviet Union.
A READER IN LONDON

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Politics, October 26, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Unknown Life of the Shah (Hardcover)

A generation ago the last Shah of Iran was seen by most people as a dictator engaged in some of the most complex politics of the Cold War.
In this book, however, we discover a fragile man, caught in the counter currents of a violent history.
It is as if someone re-wrote Macbeth to turn the principal character into Hamlet.
Which of the Shah's images was true? May be both. And the author of this book is careful enough to narrate in some detail some of the worst aspects of a 37-year long rule.The tragedy sufffered by the Iranian people since the fall of the Shah is only darkly hinted at.
In the end what counts is that this book is a fantastic read. It gives the reader a deeper insight into human character.
A READER, Paris, France