Here are a few books about Iran that I've read that illuminate Iran's history and Iranian-American relations.
Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination and Secret Diplomacy to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East. Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar. Simon & Schuster, 2023. 368 pages. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.
My default position is usually "Truth is stranger (and more interesting) than fiction," and this book definitely makes that case. I am not a spy thriller reader, but this book should appeal to that group and to those that are fans of political shows like West Wing and The Diplomat. It is an incredibly inside look at Israel’s covert operations aimed at thwarting Iran’s movement toward becoming a nuclear power. The authors show how Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has combined sabotage, cyberwarfare, assassinations, diplomatic efforts, and intelligence gathering over the last 20 years or so to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear arms and to reshape power dynamics in the Middle East. It concentrates on events since Israeli agents and Iranians opposed to their government stole Iran's top secret nuclear archives in 2018 in order to prove that Iran was violating previous agreements and actively deceiving the world. Twenty-first century warfare is in full force as Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force use cyberwarfare and drones in addition to embedded agents and on-the-ground assets and targeted assassinations to destroy Iran's program. In the process, both Israel and Iran have become Top 5 world cyber-powers. At the same time, there have been some unbelievable diplomatic gains as Israel has forged relationships with several of the Gulf states because they all see Iran as their greatest existential threat. The book does have some shortcomings. It is largely one-sided; the authors had much more access to US and Israeli participants than to Iranians. Much of the subject matter is still, of course, highly classified, so the authors had to rely on limited declassified documents and interviews with individuals involved, and intelligence agencies and those people involved all have their own agendas. Finally, time is an issue. The authors completed writing the book in April 2023, and lots of new developments have already occurred. Nevertheless, it was a more satisfying read than I anticipated, and I learned a lot about the current climate in the Middle East.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. Scott Anderson. Doubleday, 2025. 512 pages.
The Iranian Revolution and the resulting American hostage crisis happened exactly because of the reasons cited in this book's title: hubris, delusion, and miscalculation. Add stupidity, incompetence, impotence, and entrenched bureaucratic insanity. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was one of the most ill-suited men ever to be called "King of Kings." He was not that bright and had led a totally isolated and exalted life from his birth that separated him from reality. He had almost no competent advisors that ever dared to tell him the truth. Negative reports and statistics were routinely changed to positive ones before they were presented to him. He was incapable of making decisions, especially under duress. Instead, he relied on others to take action and, consequently, to take the blame if the action failed. Jimmy Carter was an inept, incompetent boob, totally in over his head from the second he stepped into the White House. Like the Shah, he was far too involved in petty details, didn't have competent and honest advisors, but he was further handicapped by his outsider status that made him the subject of ridicule, mistrust, and derision by the Washington bureaucrats and professional politician class who actively kept information from him and had no interest in carrying out his policies. Neither man saw the world as it was. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a provincial hardline religious zealot who had no idea about or interest in how a country should be run. His small group of advisors rallied around him simply because he was a viable alternative for the people's support and ignored his brutal medieval core philosophy. A coalition of wildly disparate factions including socialists, communists, modernists, republicans, and religious fundamentalists came together, only united by their desire to depose the Shah, and they each thought Khomeini could be used to attain their goal and then discarded, but almost none of them had any real confidence that a revolution would be successful. The CIA was totally incompetent (as usual), reporting to the White House, even days before the revolution, that the Shah was secure in his position for decades to come. The US Ambassador to Iran was an idiot, and embassy and consulate officials in Iran were not Iranian experts and couldn't even speak the language, just marking time until their next ill-fitted posting. They routinely ignored and buried the reports and observations of the one staffer who saw what was happening well before it did, and he was threatened with dismissal and frozen out of any meaningful role within the staff. Scott Anderson does a fantastic job of explaining what happened and why in this book, and it is incredibly readable. This is the book to read if you want to know about modern Iranian history and the history of the revolution, the effects of which still resonate almost 50 years later.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
“A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years"
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
“A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a world of protests and disappearances.... A stark, shocking impact.” —The New York Times: "The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years"
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.
