Monthly Archives: November 2021

Here is a reading on the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980 along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I remember these years vividly–I saw the first headlines about the crisis as I was passing a newsstand in the Miami airport en route to Jamaica. It was a fraught time. I have a minor quibble with this reading in that it minimizes the brutality of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who was a genuinely nasty piece of work. And even though it is perhaps beyond the ken of this reading, it would have required little more than a sentence to mention that the Shah came to power subsequent to the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran, which deposed the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The 1953 coup was engineered by both the United States Central Intelligence and the British MI6. In other words, as Dee Dee Ramone once put it, “Commando, involved again.”

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.