Bookshot #40: Shah of Shahs

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a writer that I need to get better acquainted with- a Polish Journalist who seemed to have the best career of all time, drifting from war to war and revolution to revolution writing books about them- Shah of Shahs is his story of the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran and although it's a slim little volume, it packs one helluva punch.

This book was not at all what I was expecting. Kapuscinski could have tossed out an up-to-the-minute blow by blow account of the final days of the Shahs regime. The guy was actually in Iran watching it all which would have given such an account a certain fascinating sense of immediacy- put it also would have been pedestrian and somewhat humdrum, I think. After all, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a fairly important event in 20th Century History- people have written on the subject almost ad naseum.

Kapuscinski takes a different approach however, angling the book towards getting into the nuts and bolts of what actually makes a revolution tick and how the long, tragic history of Iran and the Shah's frankly silly insistence on trying to catapult Iran into modernity overnight. The majority of the book is Kapuscinski telling the story of the Iranian Revolution by describing a series of photographs which confused me at first but had me thinking: 'damn, this guy's got game' very quickly. From the rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty right through to the end in 1979, Kapuscinski tells the story of the major events of the Iran through photographs, an elegant, creative and interesting way to tell a story that's been told a thousand times before.

Kapuscinski's style has been described as 'literary journalism' or 'magic journalism' setting his style as a non-fiction counterpart to 'magic realism' which goes along way towards explaining to why I enjoyed this book so much- I've always been a major fan of Marquez, Allende, Amado and all the magic realists and you can tell than Kapuscinski if he doesn't deliberately draw from this school of literature certainly can be claimed as a distant Polish relative.

Overall: This is a short, powerful volume chronicling the fall of the last Shah of Iran. Kapuscinski is a master of literary journalism that relies on sparse and powerful language to tell a story that students of history might have heard dozens of times before- but never like this. (There's not a wasted word in this book- there's no room for them!) He's a crusading Polish journalist that spent most of his career drifting from Revolution to Revolution- and he's just shot up my list of 'authors I need to read more of- and fast!'