A fascinating history of the global and regional intrigues and miscues that have allowed Saddam Hussein to defiantly survive. The authors, both widely published journalists in the fields of international relations and Middle East politics, contend that in the wake of the Gulf War, if Saddam was to survive, “his enemies would have to make a lot of mistakes.” And this they did. Central to the story, of course, is the US, which could never quite decide what it wanted. Wishing to be rid of Saddam but fearing a destabilized Iraq, the US called publicly for a popular uprising but gave only lukewarm support to such efforts. Rebellion in the south was thought to be backed by Iran. Rebellion in the north, among Iraqi Kurds, was seen as a threat to US ally Turkey, with its own growing Kurdish rebellions. For their part, resistance groups could never get their acts together. Two CIA-sponsored exile groups ended up fighting each other. The Kurds ended up in a civil war among competing factions, allowing Saddam to reassert his power in the north. Economic sanctions did work to cripple Iraq’s economy but at the cost of extreme deprivation among the Iraqi people, a public relations disaster both in Iraq and around the world. More effective have been arms inspections in Iraq to uncover weapons of mass destruction. Yet once it was clear that economic sanctions would end only with the end of Saddam himself, he had little incentive to comply with the demands of weapons inspectors. And all the while, through absolute cruelty and terror—and the skillful manipulation of clan and religious factions among Iraq’s elite—Saddam has remained firmly in power. With access to top US foreign policy makers as well as to Iraqi officials, the Cockburns authoritatively, and with clarity, recount a series of events that would be comic if they were not so tragic. Among the best books yet written on the malignant enigma that is Saddam Hussein.
Pub Date: March 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019266-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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