A useful historical survey, though arguably more for serious inquirers than tourists.
A dense look at the modern history of Turkey, focusing on human conflict and bureaucratic details.
In a sequel to Atatürk (2000), Mango takes up the story of modern Turkey from Atatürk’s demise, necessitating that he address both Turkey’s years of violent tumult and its emergence as a competitive, technologically advanced nation. In his first section, Mango traces several distinct narratives of conflict and compromise from 1938 to the present. The wartime President, Ismet Inönü, skillfully played his country’s interests against both Allies and Axis, continuing a political pattern of Turkey being shepherded by a wily strongman. In the 1950s, ten years of Democrat party rule produced substantial technological and agricultural gains and advanced the government’s ambitious desire for NATO membership, yet also established underlying causes of domestic unrest. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turkey’s growing pains were all too evident: its controversial military occupation of Cyprus was merely the public face of a complicated and bitter civil fight that resulted in numerous assassinations and street killings. Ironically, it took a 1980 military coup that restored law and order “by draconian means” to begin a return to the forward-looking secularism first espoused by Atatürk. In his second section, Mango systematically examines the country’s present achievements in economics and education and the transformations that are still underway in the revered cities of Ankara and Istanbul (the putative centers of government and cultural achievement, respectively). Throughout, Mango seems fascinated by the minutiae, a quality that lends his book the feel of a nation’s lived experience. Still, it’s easy for a reader to get lost among the shifting sands of conspiracy and commerce. Although Mango begins his survey by noting that “The unevenness of modernization and of material progress makes it hard to sum up the state of Turkey today,” it’s clear by the time he concludes that the Turks remain a forward-looking and pragmatic people.
A useful historical survey, though arguably more for serious inquirers than tourists.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-615-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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