We’re now at peak summer season, and I hope you’re finding time to rest, relax, and enjoy some reading that takes you farther afield. Here are two non-finance books that I’ve enjoyed this summer.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
I trace my first recollection of political awareness back to 1979. In 5th grade, one student stood out as more worldly than the rest of us. She talked about the Middle East, oil, political strife, the State Department, and “the Shah” – things I knew nothing about at the time.
I’d filled in some of the gaps since then, but Anderson’s book tells a full story of what happened in Iran in the late 1970s.
Once toasted by President Carter as an unshakable ally presiding over “an island of stability,” commanding the world’s fifth largest army and vast oil wealth— Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled into exile just fourteen months later, forced out by a religious revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Anderson frames the collapse as a story of American diplomatic blunders and miscalculations that helped trigger hostilities that have destabilized the region for decades, arguing that the revolution was as world-shattering as the French and Russian revolutions.
What makes it especially resonant now is the broader pattern Anderson identifies: the resentment of economically marginalized, religiously fervent populations toward a wealthy secular elite has fueled unrest across the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Europe – with Iran serving as the template.
The book is a useful lens for understanding how great-power miscalculation and populist backlash can compound into events with generational consequences.
Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King by Caroline Bicks
My summer wouldn’t be complete without reading something by, or about, Stephen King.
A few months ago, I was listening to a BBC reporter interview Caroline Bicks, the inaugural Stephen E. King Chair of Literature at the University of Maine.
Bicks told the story that she was instructed by the University of Maine administration to set aside the idea of ever getting in touch with Stephen King, despite her holding the chair endowed by him.
However, King eventually reached out to Bicks, they struck up a professional relationship and friendship, and this book is the product of her having access to his archives.
Monsters in the Archives is part literary master class, part biography, part memoir, and an investigation into our deepest anxieties, drawing on unprecedented access to King’s private papers.
Bicks focuses on five of King’s most iconic early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ‘Salem’s Lot, and Night Shift—tracing his margin notes and editorial changes to reveal how he built his language, storylines, and characters, and she uncovered unpublished scenes and alternate endings that King allowed her to publish for the first time.
The book offers longtime readers a rare backstage look at how some of the most influential horror fiction of the last half-century was actually constructed, alongside Bicks’s own story of rereading these books as an adult confronting the childhood fears they first stirred in her.
Happy Reading!
-RK