Shehryar Fazli at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
Scott Anderson begins his latest book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution; A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (2025), with the story of an infamous 1971 party in a desert. The king of Anderson’s title, Iran’s shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was ostensibly marking 2,500 years of the Persian empire in Persepolis, once the capital under Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BCE. At a time of political stress, the shah was making a bid to link the Pahlavi dynasty, and himself in particular, to Cyrus, as the basis of an unquestionable legitimacy—“his rule and his achievements forming a continuum with those of the ancient immortals,” in Anderson’s words.
By some estimates, the party cost upwards of $600 million, and by all accounts, it was a flop. The images, which you can see in the 2016 BBC documentary Decadence and Downfall: The Shah of Iran’s Ultimate Party, are on a level of ostentation and sheer kitsch that borders on farce.
More here.
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