ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been written without Lisa Dickey, editor, book doctor, skeptic, and invaluable scold. Every morning I turned on my computer to find an e-mail from her challenging one thing or another. “Why should the reader care?” she’d ask. Lisa made sure that irrelevant trivia, which so often find their way into books written by people who spend their lives in the Middle East, stayed out, and she put everything neatly in order.

I also could not have written this book without Kevin Toolis, Many Rivers Films, and Britain’s Channel 4, which allowed me to tag along in their filming of documentaries on suicide and car bombers. I am deeply indebted to Nikki Keddie’s Modern Iran, Vali Nasr’s The Shia Revival, and Roy Mottahedeh’s The Mantle of the Prophet, essential reading for understanding modern Iran. Finally, I thank my editor at Crown, Rick Horgan, who gave me the idea for the book—and kept it on track. In the end, any failings in this book are entirely mine.