On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as “an island of stability “ due to “your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.” Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?
The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. Scott Anderson tells this astonishing tale with the narrative brio, mordant wit, and keen analysis that made his bestselling Lawrence of Arabia one of the key texts in understanding the modern Middle East. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval – and Iran was the template. King of Kings is a bravura work of history, and a warning.
About the Speakers:
Scott Anderson is the author of two novels and five works of nonfiction, including Lawrence of Arabia, an international bestseller which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. He is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine. The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to his reportage across the Middle East in August 2016, which was published in book form as Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.
Mark Bowden is the author of fifteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for the Atlantic and other magazines.
Michael Metrinko is a former Peace Corps volunteer and diplomat, with far too many years in the world's hardship regions and conflict zones than anyone should have to experience. Much time spent in ancient cities, in marble villas, leaking tents, trailers, workers' tenements and peasant huts, as well as in foreign prisons. Presently retired in central Pennsylvania, surrounded by forests, mountains and wide-open skies that allow peaceful contemplation and occasional mentoring of politically-minded students.
