What do you know about Ross Perot? All I personally knew before reading this book was about his failed election campaign of 1992. I was in college at that time, and mostly I remember my Republican relatives blaming Perot for the fact that Bill Clinton had been elected. (I don't think this is completely unfair, either; the fact is that he split the conservative vote by running against the party nominee, and he should have known it was impossible to win without a major party nomination.) At the time Perot was a bit of a comic figure, a billionaire who thought he could be president, and failed to win.
Well, this book is all about something I DIDN'T know about Perot. He was a bit of a bad-ass, apparently. In 1978, Perot's company was working with the Shah of Iran on a government computerization project when a couple of his employees got caught in the political crossfire of a revolution and ended up in Iranian jail with an exorbitant bail/ransom price-tag on their heads. Perot was determined to get them out, and this book is the story of how that happened.
I also read recently by this author: Triple
Warning! Long parenthetical aside about classification: (I couldn't decide whether to categorize this book as fiction or nonfiction. I've read most of Ken Follet's books, and most of them are fiction, although many are based on true historical events. This one, however, is about rather recent history, and the author explicitly states in the beginning that everything written in it is true to the best of his knowledge, and not a novelization. Still, I was unsure. I had listened to the story on audiobook, and so I did not have a paper copy to refer to, and the barnesandnoble.com record referenced above did not classify one way or the other. I decided to try to settle the question by checking to see if the library categorized the book as fiction and filed by author's name, or if they had assigned it a Dewey Decimal number and marked it as nonfiction. Interestingly, my local library system had a record of several copies of this book, and about half of them were filed under fiction, and half under nonfiction. So the library didn't know what to do either!)
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