Book is great and well-researched until it hits 1979, and then the author just goes on a diatribe. Shame, because there was a lot of nuance describing Reza Khan’s military innovation. I expected good analysis at the end and it was really just “Mullahs bad, mullahs stupid.” And then post Iran-Iraq war, it’s actual disinformation and you can see the ex-CIA author just regurgitating his colleagues’ talking points of the last 8 years. No originality.
The reader mispronounced so much it was embarrassing. I understand that this text had a lot of foreign words, but it frankly showed a lack of effort to even bother researching the pronunciation of words that were said dozens of times.