Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski is my favorite journalist-author. Everything I've read by him has been excellent. He spent his life in beautiful places where miserable things were happening, e.g. Idi Amin's Uganda or Soviet Georgia. The first book I read by him was The Shadow of the Sun, which is a compilation of essays that he wrote during his time in Sub-Saharan Africa, beginning in the late 1950's. I read it in 1998. Since then, any time I'm stuck waiting for any form of public transport, I think of his story in re: getting on a bus in Nigeria, sitting there for a few hours, and finally asking other passengers when the bus is going to leave....and them looking at him like he's an idiot and saying, "Uhhh, when the bus is Full."

Shah of Shahs is, like most of his books, a very short read. And like most of his books, about half of it is spent telling us how much he enjoys the company of the people he's gotten to know in the year or two he's been in that country, a quarter of it explains the cultural history of those people, and a quarter of it details what terrible things they're having to deal with at the time he's writing this.

There is a chapter in Shah of Shahs based on his showing an Iranian a photograph of three or four people waiting for a bus, and the interviewee points out how they're all watching each other, and says he's sure one or two of them are SAVAK agents, and relates a story about folks who ended up in prison being tortured because they were overheard at bus stops blaming the late bus on the Shah.