Shah of Shahs

This journalist’s portrait of life in Iran just after the Revolution is “a book of great economy and power [with] a supreme sense of the absurd” ( New Republic ). Iran, 1980: the revolutionaries have taken charge. In a deserted Teheran hotel, Ryszard Kapuściński tries to make journalistic and human sense out of the mass of notes, tapes, and photographs he had accumulated during his extended stay in Iran. Just what happened and how? What did Khomeini have to offer that the Shah, who promised to “