Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam

Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam David Farber. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

If we agree with Dick Cavett's characterization of the 1970s as a time when "one could easily wonder if the gods were testing us to see how much we could endure," then 1979 was perhaps the ultimate test of that endurance. With a near disaster at Three Mile Island, wrenching oil shocks, and the specter of economic "stagflation" hovering above all, the year unfolded as a series of escalating calamities which reached the boiling point when radical Islamic students seized American embassy staff in Tehran on November 4. Thus began the 444 days of the Iranian hostage crisis, the crucial watershed that David Färber chronicles in this absorbing account.

The heart of the book consists of a gripping narrative taking us through the paroxysms of the initial embassy takeover, the various...