Plenty of ammunition here for those who believe a “campaign of lies and distortion” accounts for the U.S. presence in Iraq.
A former 60 Minutes producer exposes 85 years of Western recklessness and fecklessness in Iraq.
As Saddam Hussein stands in the dock, it’s no accident, argues Lando, that the special tribunal passing judgment on his 25-year reign of terror may charge and subpoena only Iraqi citizens. Before an international court, or any kind of independent inquiry, the brutal dictator might have been permitted to call other witnesses in his defense and thereby expose a sordid Western history of betrayals, reprisals and manipulations that have mightily contributed to Iraq’s misery. Relying on a few scholarly sources, many recent journalistic accounts and a bit of original reporting, the author supplies the argument Saddam’s defense attorneys only wish they could employ. For Lando, the original sin may be traced back to the end of World War I, when the British, needing military bases and easy access to the region’s vast oil deposits, carved out the artificial state of Iraq from the tattered remains of the Ottoman Empire. This cobbling together of peoples and tribes to suit the requirements of Western powers ensured a “nation” that would be perilous to govern. And so it has proven, from the British-installed King Faisal and his son Ghazi to a line of military dictators culminating in the Baath Party’s Saddam. Lando devotes the bulk of his narrative to the West’s complicity in Saddam’s regime, whether through leaders like Thatcher, Chirac, Brezhnev and Gorbachev or a succession of American presidents (especially those named Bush) and a series of foreign-policy and military experts who did their bidding. Though he stoutly maintains that his piling up of detail, incident and anecdote in no way absolves Saddam, Lando’s highly tendentious argument—who else, any longer, unquestioningly accepts the testimony of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson or arms-inspector Scott Ritter?—and unremitting focus on the misdeeds of the West leaves the reader grasping for equilibrium.
Plenty of ammunition here for those who believe a “campaign of lies and distortion” accounts for the U.S. presence in Iraq.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2007
ISBN: 1-59051-238-3
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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