Shah of Shahs

"Kapuściński’s writing has a poetry to it that I adore. He was a journalist, working for the Polish state news agency, writing a lot of routine stories. Books were his release, a chance to get at the inner truth of what was happening. Some have accused him of imagining too much, but I remain loyal. Fundamentally, he doesn’t distort in the big picture. He lets things speak. It’s like a playwright’s writing, but it’s not fiction. He stands the test of time."

"Kapuscinski is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of the 20th century. Polish by birth, he witnessed some 40 revolutions and wars during his time as a journalist. He had already built a long and illustrious career when he found his way to Iran on the eve of the 1979 revolution. At that moment it was still a populist revolution rather than an Islamic one – the contours of the revolution were as yet undefined. So it is an interesting moment for him to have found himself on the streets of Tehran. Like so many of his books, Shah of Shahs completely defies journalistic standards and generic classifications. Rather, it presents an impressionistic portrait of the country at those critical moments before the revolution gelled. With poetic virtuosity, Kapuscinski captures the confusion, the despair and also the flashes of hope that gripped Iran at that moment. Accounts by so-called outsiders can, I think, sometimes be particularly rich and revealing. Kapuscinski had seen chaos in endless guises, and he offered up uncanny insights into the machinations of tyranny – and not just in the Iranian context. In Shah of Shahs , as in his many other books, he writes of how tyranny seeps into the psyche of a people. And yet there is a purposeful distance he cultivates about his subject. The Iranian characters in the book are held almost at a remove. I believe that that remove signals a concession to the limits of what he can know from his vantage point as an outsider looking in on the revolution."