The Nation, June 22nd, 1985
The theme of Ryszard Kapuscinski's second book in English is the same as that of his first, and equally pleasing in its new presentation. The emperor was a stylized account of the final days of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie; Shah of Shah's tells of the fall of Iran's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The theme is covertly didactic: what goes too far up must come crashing down. It's one of the oldest stories in history, and one of the best.
The Shah's reign, particularly after Iran's enrichment in the oil boom of the mid-1970s and his fall in the 1979 Shiite revolution, have been amply examined by American...
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