Synopses & Reviews
The Persian language edition of "The Persian Sphinx is itself a publishing phenomenon. The author of the original, Abbas Milani, translated the book to Persian and a complete version was released in the united States, while a censored edition--minus about five page the Iranian censors deemed unfit to print--was allowed to be published in Iran. Since Iran had not signed the copyright laws, a pirate edition was also published, almost simultaneously. The book has now become a publishing sensation in Iran and has gone to some twenty-two prints--including the pirate edition and the English version in the US and in England. In Iran it has been often referred to in reviews as the fastest selling non-fiction book in the post-revolutionary era. It is said, in many of the reviews, that the book has radically changed the nature and expectation of scholarship in Iran, and that it is the first modern biography, comparable to its Western counterparts, published in Iran. The daily "Keyhan, the mouthpiece of Iranian conservative hard-liners, has begun a polemic against the book. It has hitherto published twelve installments in a series of articles attacking Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran's late Prime Minister, executed in 1980 by Islamic revolutionaries. The articles are clearly meant to undercut the impact of our book, but ironically, in a gesture reminiscent of the tactics used by the government in Soviet days to control publications like "Pravda, the "Keyhan articles have yet to make any clear reference to the book itself. Otherwise it has been reviewed widely and popularly by the Iranian press and the book has become the focus for a reappraisal of the past, especially the influence of the United Stateson the evolution of modern Iranian politics.