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THE SHAH'S LAST RIDE

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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