This book has been banned in Iran since its inception and has not had a chance to be widely read and appreciated. This edition reveals Hedayat's motive for writing the piece. It shows that behind the rambling and the disarray, there is a sobering theme: power. As a symbol for power, the pearl cannon changes hands and with it, power shifts from one oppressive group to another. If the Iranian shahs are ridiculed, so are the Islamic clergy who, having rivaled them through centuries, have sought to uproot the Iranian identity. The 1979 Iranian revolution vindicates the assertions which Hedayat, tongue in-cheek, made here decades earlier.