The Priest and the King
Book description
The author, a former British diplomat, was living in Tehran during the build-up to the Iranian Revolution and kept a day-to-day account of the events he witnessed, as the priest and the king - the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shah - squared up to each other. The author's faithfully recorded…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Priest and the King as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I well remember following the sequence of events–a terrible fire that killed 430 trapped in a cinema in Abadan, riots, mass shootings by the army, strikes, politicization, and Islamicization of students–which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Like many others I was both excited and filled with foreboding at the time. To read Desmond Harney’s eyewitness account is to be carried right into the middle of things. I was utterly gripped as the Iranian middle classes grasped at forlorn hopes and as those hopes faded away in the face of the ‘single-mindedness, implacability, fierce puritanism and commanding authority’ of…
From James' list on Iran, past and present.
Want books like The Priest and the King?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Priest and the King.
Share your top 3 reads of 2024!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,187
readers submitted
so far, will you?
