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, Iranian revolutionaries and US officials from the Carter administration In this remarkably human portrait of one of the twentieth century's most complicated personalities, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Andrew Scott Cooper traces the Shah's life from childhood through his ascension to the throne in 1941. He draws the turbulence of the post-war 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. Readers 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; even Empress Farah herself, and the rest of the Iranian Imperial family. Intimate and sweeping at once, 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.

"The search for the Promised Land took socialists in diverse directions: revolution, communes and kibbutzim, social democracy, communism, fascism, Third Worldism. But none of these paths led to the prophesied utopia. Nowhere did socialists succeed in creating societies of easy abundance or in midwifing the birth of a "New Man," as their theory promised. Some socialist governments abandoned their grandiose goals and satisfied themselves with making slight modifications to capitalism, while others plowed ahead doggedly, often inducing staggering human catastrophes. Then, after two hundred years of wishful thinking and fitful governance, socialism suddenly imploded in the 1990s in a fin du siecle drama of falling walls, collapsing regimes and frantic revisions of doctrine."--BOOK JACKET.

Reveals the covert agreements that prompted America's decision to switch allegiance from Iran to Saudi Arabia as a dominant Middle-East oil supplier, citing the contributions of key players from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to the Shah and Gerald Ford while explaining how choices in the 1970s set the stage for Iran's Islamic revolution.

An Iranian scholar chronicles the life and legacy of the last Shah of Iran, including his role in the creation of the modern Islamic republic.

The son of the deposed Shah of Iran reflects on Iran's political situation (without mentioning his father) and argues for a campaign of civil disobedience to the current Iranian regime that would hopefully lead to a constitutional monarchy restoring a Pahlavi to the throne of Iran. He discusses energy policy, foreign policy, and the Iranian Diaspora suggesting that the policies of the current clerical leaders of Iran have led to disastrous results for the Iranian people. He counters this with some rather bland bromides about international cooperation, secularization, self-determination, and cultural preservation. If brought back to the throne, he claims he will consult all of the Iranian people in governing the nation. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

From the author of the acclaimed Dinner with Persephone comes a radically original novel about four women who invite us to imagine the divine anew: what if “a woman’s point of view” were also God’s? Patricia Storace’s Eve begins by telling us her version of what happened in Eden, and by revealing that our familiar constellations conceal other heavens we have never allowed ourselves to see. Each of the four subsequent chapters is the story of one of these new zodiacs, featuring images central to women: a knife, a cauldron, a garden, a pair of embracing lovers. The four women whose stories they tell are Job’s daughter, the Queen of Sheba, a polytheistic cook, and a transformed Sarah, wife of Abraham. Storace brilliantly reimagines the worlds of these women, freeing them from the old tales in which they were trapped and putting them in the foreground of their stories and of the Old Testament itself.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran, addresses questions about his country, his regime, and international politics in an account of his life and political career