Iran's Epic and America's Empire
Mahmoud Omidsalar is a  world authority on Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Very few people anywhere in the  world know the Persian epic inside out as well as he does. Omidsalar's  Iran's Epic and America's Empire is a bold political manifesto written  by a master literary scholar. His steely meditations come at a  particularly troubling time when Ferdowsi's birthplace is ruled by  chronic autocracy and threatened by military strike. Omidsalar writes  with conviction, courage, steadfast determination, and a defiant will to  recollect, to remind, and to claim the Iranian posterity.Hamid  Dabashi (Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative  Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York)In Iran s Epic and  America s Empire, Mahmoud Omidsalar the master of Shahnameh Studies,  attempts to provide a personal narrative about the substance and meaning  of the greatest literary work composed in the Persianate World. Along  the way he provides a useful and contentious purview of the pre-modern  history of Iran and the life of the composer of the epic, Abol-Ghasem  Ferdowsi. Furthermore, Omidsalar not only dispels the common Eurocentric  notions about Iran and the Shahnameh, but also takes on the blind  nationalism of his own countrymen who at times are blinded by their own  chauvinism. He shows how this xenophobic view has kept some from  understanding the essence and nature of the Persian epic and Iran's  cultural achievement. Whoever reads this book will be forced to think  about her/his own views on the meaning and importance of the Shahnameh.Touraj  Daryaee (Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the  Persianate World at the University of California, Irvine)