Two world leaders are tested by terrorists in this new nail-biter of a limited series. Suranne Jones plays Britain’s prime minister and Julie Delpy the president of France—two politicians of clashing ideological bents who must work together when a terrorist group kidnaps the prime minister’s husband and begins issuing threats to the French leader. As the noose tightens, each woman faces a choice between their duties to family and world order. Thursday, Aug. 21, Netflix.

by Scott Anderson

“It’s an event that ranks among the most seminal in history,” said Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, and yet the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 left behind questions that have “tormented historians” ever since. The uprising that toppled the U.S.-backed shah and installed a brutal anti-Western autocratic Islamist regime at the heart of the Middle East unfolded quickly, taking U.S. leaders by surprise. Suddenly, the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was gone, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an elderly religious fundamentalist, had returned from exile to seize control of a country that in the past three and a half decades had seen a dramatic rise in per capita income, life expectancy, and women’s rights. Scott Anderson’s “sweeping, gripping” new account of the revolution offers compelling answers to lingering questions and “makes past times and people spring to life.” 

“This is an exceptional and important book,” said Mark Bowden in The New York Times. “Scrupulous and enterprising reporting rarely combine with such superb storytelling.” And Anderson shows us what went wrong, starting with his portrait of the shah. “An American creation first and last,” the shah “had lived in a make-believe world,” insulated by personal wealth and by a secret police force, Savak, that “terrorized anyone who refused to play along.” Besides effectively closing himself off from signs of unrest, he was, even after 37 years in power, “incapable of making hard decisions,” and U.S. intelligence was too blind to provide useful guidance. Anderson focuses most of his attention on the missteps of the U.S. and the shah, said Arash Azizi in The Atlantic, and “he’s weaker in examining the diverse factions of Iranians who opposed the shah.” Many Iranians who joined the swelling 1978 protests were angered by rising inequality and weren’t seeking a theocracy. But Khomeini happened into prominence when the uprising required a leader. In King of Kings, the rise of the Islamic Republic comes across as “not some historical inevitability but, in many ways, an accident.” 

“But a revolution, unlike a coup, isn’t the work of individuals alone,” said Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker. “It requires mass support,” and the Iranian revolution eventually pulled 2 million people into action, a share of the population larger than in any other 20th-century revolution. “The fact that the revolution was unexpected doesn’t mean it was contingent.” Even the protesters couldn’t have predicted the course Iran was about to take: the execution of thousands of Khomeini’s perceived enemies, militants’ seizure of 66 hostages at the U.S. Embassy, and the unbroken nearly half-century reign of an unpopular dictatorship. “As Anderson’s book suggests, an event that is improbable can still be irreversible.”

The astronaut who salvaged a doomed mission

Jim Lovell was more than 200,000 miles from Earth when he realized he wouldn’t make it to the rocky surface of the moon. The commander of NASA’s 1970 Apollo 13 mission, Lovell, by then an experienced astronaut, was slated to make his first moon landing along with fellow crew member Fred Haise. But on Day 3 of the mission, as the men prepared to enter lunar orbit, an oxygen tank exploded in the command module, leaving them scrambling to survive. Jack Swigert, the third crewmate, was the first to utter the famous phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” and Lovell then repeated it to ground control. With their lives on the line, the trio followed engineers’ instructions to rejigger the tiny but thankfully undamaged lunar module as a lifeboat, and they sling-shotted themselves back to Earth. Americans watched rapt from their living rooms as the astronauts finally splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. “The only thing we could do was try to get home,” Lovell said in 1995. “The idea of despair never occurred to us.” 

As a boy growing up in Milwaukee, James Arthur Lovell Jr. was “fascinated by rocketry,” said The Guardian (U.K.). A decade after graduating from the Naval Academy, the test pilot and engineer was selected for NASA’s Gemini program and made his first foray into space orbiting the Earth for two weeks in 1965. A few years later, he was one of three astronauts chosen for NASA’s first crewed lunar mission, Apollo 8, which resulted in the jaw-dropping “Earthrise” photo. At one point during the flight, “Lovell extended his arm toward the window of the spacecraft,” said CNN.com, and covered the Earth, a tiny blue and white sphere, with his thumb. 

Apollo 13 was Lovell’s last mission before he retired from NASA in 1973 to join the business world. But later he “became something of a pop culture figure,” said The New York Times, after Tom Hanks portrayed him in the Ron Howard–directed Apollo 13 (1995), an acclaimed Hollywood retelling of his crew’s harrowing journey back to Earth. While Lovell never did make his moonwalk, he didn’t consider Apollo 13 a failure. Instead, he took pride in the teamwork and quick thinking he and his crewmates displayed. “Although I didn’t land on the moon and was disappointed,” Lovell said, the mission became “a triumph in a different direction, meaning people getting back from a certain catastrophe.”