Word: shawcross
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shawcross briskly recounts the Shah's decline and fall, from the first wobbles of the Peacock Throne to the restrained dash to the airport with Queen Farah Diba, their entourage and pets. But unlike luckier deposed billionaires, the Shah did not have a soft landing. He had cancer and was coming down with an acute case of political leprosy. Switzerland, France and Britain, concerned about oil and terrorism, rolled up the welcome mat. Despite entreaties by the Rockefellers, who handled the fallen Shah's finances and provided him with a live-in public relations man, and Henry Kissinger, President Jimmy...
...Shawcross ferrets out a wealth of political, diplomatic and intelligence detail, as well as a fragrant cache of jet-set gossip. In his prime, the Shah had a special yen for Lufthansa hostesses but also entertained a variety of lovelies flown in from Mme. Claude's in Paris. His other tastes were rich, but, oddly, Iran's leading personage did not eat caviar...
...October 1979, in desperate need of treatment, the Shah was allowed to enter the U.S. temporarily. By the time he checked into New York Hospital, he had an international collection of physicians. Shawcross's last chapters reverberate with the clash of medical opinions and large egos. When things sorted out, the Shah was back in Egypt, where his spleen was removed by the renowned Texas heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. The procedure also revealed fatal malignancies of the liver...
...July 27, 1980, Radio Tehran announced the death of "the bloodsucker of the century." The judgment was self-serving and exaggerated the Shah's stature. Shawcross's story of a pawn in King's clothing comes to a sorrier conclusion. The Shah's reign, this book suggests, was less a study in the banality of evil than the banality of pride...
Novelist Larry McMurtry converts facts into folklore, tapping themes that belong to our cultural gene pool. -- William Shawcross recounts the decline and fall of the Shah of Iran...