Why, oh why is there not a city map of Tehran and one of the twenty-seven acre American Embassy compound as it existed in 1979 included in this history lesson? That would have obviated the need for pages and pages of geographic description and provided much needed clarity for readers. And perhaps a map of the Middle East centred on Iran, for those of us who are geographically challenged.
History, at least as taught in my school days, usually consisted of rote memorization of date’s and facts as deemed important by the teacher. It was far from my favourite subject, although I recall getting good marks for an essay in I wrote in ?1962 regurgitating standard drivel about the evils of Fidel Castro’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, for the modern history class. I am now old enough to realize that I failed to recognize the importance of many critical historical events as they were happening, blithely oblivious to the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the importance of the launch of Sputnik, the birth of Bangladesh, the rise of the Polish Solidarity movement, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. I even knew no details about 9/11 until 9/15, being sequestered in the wilds of northern Ontario, happily fly fishing for big salmon. I recall the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, but never knew much about the Canadian involvement in that. This book certainly enlightened me about that.
Robert Wright is a history professor at Trent University in Peterborough. His exhaustively researched account of the hostage crisis, the exemplary but unconventional actions of the Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Taylor, and the many other players involved provides a quite unique insight into the infighting in the early days of the Islamic Republic, the earlier corruption and cruelty in the Shah’s regime, and the manipulative actions of the U.S. government in the internal affairs of a foreign country. (I was friendly with an Iranian postdoctoral fellow at Yale in 1975, but we never dared to discuss politics or religion, and I now wonder what happened to him when he returned to Iran.) The undercover world of espionage with participation by various branches of various governments, often working at cross purposes, is worthy of a John le Carre novel. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the details because relevant documents are still classified, but there are nevertheless many new revelations-at least new to me. William Sloan Coffin, the controversial Yale chaplain whose sermons I enjoyed listening to, was a CIA operative. The KGB issued forged documents to discredit Iranian government officials, one of whom was promptly beheaded. Canada maintained a secret link between the Iranian government and that of Israel.
There are deficiencies in this analysis. Nowhere is there any discussion of what about the Shi’ite brand of Islamism as practiced in Iran allowed the clerics to take complete control and overrule decisions by elected government officials. As in most history books, the portrayal of some players seems slanted. Jimmy Carter is conscientious but weak and vacillating. Flora MacDonald and Joe Clark could do no wrong, but Pierre Trudeau was duplicitous and unprincipled.
I am sure that this book is a valuable resource for history buffs, and it is very educational. But it does little to entice those already turned off of history to turn on to it.
The Passionate Reader 