From the Shah's palace to the revolution's prisons

With very partial exceptions, no Iranian who closely experienced the fall of the Pahlavi Empire and the birth of the Islamic Revolution has been able to give even an honest testimony until now. In the fifty hours he spent with the Shah during the last days of his rule, as well as in the thirty-three months he spent in the revolution's prisons, Ehsan Naraghi was insightful in both cases. He presented us with a valuable and accessible book at the same time, shedding light on the turning points of the Iranian Revolution. The book depicts, in broad scenes, a political earthquake similar to the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917. In its successive broad scenes, a dark face appears of unscrupulous sycophants and hangmen deserving of hanging. It also shows influential faces like the enlightened Empress Farah, who failed to curb the corruption of the royal family, and like young Islamists condemned to death, ground down by the machinery they helped set in motion. "Anyone who knows Mr. Naraghi realizes to what extent his delicate intellectual nature allowed him to bravely criticize without falling into the ideological temptations that impoverish the richness of the human soul and political skill."