America and Iran by John Ghazvinian

This is a fascinating telling of the relationship between the United States and Iran going back to before the US was an independent country. The book starts there, when things were good, and then goes through a very detailed retelling of how it went wrong over and over again up until the present day. Iran had so much promise as an ally in the Middle East. Somehow along the way that perspective got warped. Iran was different religiously than many of the other countries in the region with a predominantly Shiite population, and one where the separation between mosque and state was established. They had a colonial relationship with Britain they were eager to shed and had no love of Russia back in the beginning of the 20th century. There were so many mistakes made along the way, but the fist one was installing the Shah in 1953, which squashed democracy in its infancy and as time went on, the Shah made the country ripe for revolution. The subsequent chain of events pushed Iran further from the west, and then the demonizing was ramped up to what is possibly the point of no return. Very sad course of events.