Hooman Majd's Return

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO… Hooman Majd, the real estate broker who ended up as Chris Blackwell’s right-hand man at Island Records and Palm Pictures, has penned his second book about Iran, The Ayatollahs’ Democracy, which takes us behind the scenes of the country’s last, controversial election. The Iranian-born Majd, the grandson of an Ayatollah and distant cousin of former President Mohammad Khatami, likens current ruler Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s erratic behavior to a “Persian theater of the absurd.” His previous book was called The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. The New York Observer calls his latest “a timely, insightful, refreshingly lucid tour of this deeply confounding and contradictory land.” (10/26p)