An immersive, gripping account of the rise and fall of Iran’s glamorous Pahlavi dynasty, written with the cooperation of the late shah’s widow, Empress Farah
In this remarkably human portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most complicated personalities, author Andrew Scott Cooper traces Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He highlights the turbulence of the postwar era, during which the shah survived assassination attempts and coup plots to build a modern, pro-Western state and launch Iran onto the world stage as one of the world’s top five powers. Listeners get the story of the shah’s political career alongside the story of his courtship and marriage to Farah Diba, who became a power in her own right; the beloved family they created; and an exclusive look at life inside the palace during the Iranian Revolution.
Cooper’s investigative account ultimately delivers the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty through the eyes of those who were there: leading Iranian revolutionaries, President Jimmy Carter and White House officials, US Ambassador William Sullivan and his staff in the American embassy in Tehran, American families caught up in the drama, and even Empress Farah herself, along with the rest of the Iranian Imperial family.
At once intimate and sweeping, The Fall of Heaven recreates in stunning detail the dramatic and final days of one of the world’s most legendary ruling families, the unseating of which helped set the stage for the current state of the Middle East.
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“A sympathetic account of the imperial couple of the Peacock Throne portrayed as so blindly benevolent that they did not see the Iranian Revolution coming…Cooper addresses many of what he believes are misconceptions of the regime, such as the grossly inflated numbers of those imprisoned and executed by the shah’s notorious secret police as well as the shah’s consent to the use of force on demonstrators. A thorough new appraisal of an enigmatic ruler who died believing his people still loved him.”
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Kirkus Reviews (starred review)