Review of King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday, 2025)
Scott Anderson’s new book, King of Kings, takes its title from the English translation of “Shahanshah,” the official Persian-language title of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s last king or shah, who was overthrown during a popular revolution in 1979.
Anderson, a US political journalist who has previously written both novels and nonfiction works, like the best-selling Lawrence in Arabia, approaches this true-life story in the dramatic style of a fictional work.
In line with previous accounts of the Iranian Revolution, it focuses on the ways in which the shah’s delusional despotism, aided and abetted by a succession of US administrations, paved the road for Iran’s revolution.
King of Kings comes in the wake of several recent books on the history of US-Iran relations, including works by John Ghazvinian, Mahmood Monshipouri, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Matthew K. Shannon, Vali Nasr, and Mohsen Milani, as well as my own forthcoming Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations. These are scholarly tracts that closely trace Persian- and English-language sources, primarily addressed to readers interested in Middle East history and US foreign affairs.
Aimed at a wider, nonspecialist readership, Anderson’s book is cast in a different register, with a nonacademic style and prose, and his sources are all in English (though some are translations of Persian originals). King of Kings uses scholarly material idiosyncratically to give its narrative hyperbolic thrust and dramatic flair. A few pages into its preface, for example, the book draws an idyllic picture of the shah’s reign to amplify the shock effect of its imminent overthrow:
Over the span of the shah’s rule, per capita income had increased a phenomenal twenty times over, the literacy rate had quintupled, and the average lifespan of an Iranian had more than…
Auteur: Afshin Matin-Asgari
