4.5 rounded up for keeping me thoroughly engaged for almost 700 pages. The older history was completely new to me and the modern history provided much food for thought. ( )

This study of American-Iranian interactions from the early eighteenth century to the Trump presidency is most interesting during its early chapters, when John Ghazvinian teases out the evolving relations between first the young republic and the ancient empire, and then the burgeoning world power and the emerging democracy. There's a lot of fascinating cultural history here, particularly about American "Persophilia", that shows many little known connections and roads-not-taken.

However, the closer we get to the present day, the more America and Iran faltered for me. Ghazvinian—an Iranian-born American—is understandably very invested in seeing more normalised, settled relations between the two countries. But this results in him trying to handwave as much as possible in the two countries' respective domestic and foreign policies for the last 50 years or so, often seeking to displace the reason for ongoing U.S.-Iranian hostilities onto Israel. (Which, don't get me wrong, the Netanyahu administration in particular can't be described as good faith actors, but nor are they the only actors here.)

The cultural history also largely drops out in the latter part of the book, replaced by a fairly old-school political history, which focuses on the manoeuverings of upper-level male politicians. There's one anecdote given in passing about Jackie Kennedy, the Empress Farah, and competing tiara sizes, that made me long for a book which looked much more at the history of "soft power" and which actually seemed to care about women. ( )