I found this book fascinating because I really didn’t know much about the embassy takeover before reading it. I think this is because it happened just before I was born – that sort of relatively recent history doesn’t show up much in history classes (which is a shame, I think, since it’s so relevant).

I was impressed with how well the author kept my interest all throughout this substantial book (it’s 500+ pages, the standoff lasted over a year). It is definitely biased in favor of the Americans, probably due to the fact that it was somewhat easier for the author to get access to the hostages than to their captors. However, it could have been worse – a lot of the captors are portrayed humanistically, as people who made a mistake in the heat of passion and later regretted it.

What really chilled me about this book (and it’s probably not indended by the author) is the way that the description of Iran at the time reminded me of the US NOW in a lot of ways. The ill-informed populace, the government at the mercy of religious leaders (in the US’s case, business leaders), the willful ignoring of evidence and the adoption of wishful thinking as fact…brrrrr. In the final chapter, the author seems really supportive of the current US administration, or seems to insinuate that despite the stance of the Iranian government, that the people of Iran really love the US. I doubt it’s as simple as that. The author may have just been trying to show the complicated nature of the relationship between the countries, but it comes off as something scarily similar to what we heard before the invasion of Iraq (i.e. “they love the US, we’ll be greeted as liberators!”).

Overall this is worth a read. I’m going to read “All the Shah’s Men” next, I think – this book kind of glossed over all the nasty stuff the US had been up to in Iran prior to the Revolution.