Engaging research and bottomless detail by an avid observer and student of the region.
A sweeping history of the cradle of civilization between the Tigris and the Euphrates, underscoring the region’s unique gifts to humanity.
As a journalist and longtime observer of the region rather than a historian, Bull conveys the excitement of uncovering new intellectual treasures for the reader as he moves from the first Sumerian civilization to the archaeological discoveries at Nineveh in the 1840s. The “land between the rivers” has benefited from but also been ravaged by its singular location between fluctuating empires, Persia to the east and Arabia and Rome to the west. Bull dwells initially on the invention of writing at Uruk around 3300 B.C.E. In the “turbulent, frustrated quest” chronicled in Gilgamesh, an epic probably based on a real Uruk king, builder, and seeker, “we can begin to see the origins of an outlook of free will.” Constant warfare seemed to follow: first with the mighty Assyrian neighbors; then the formidable empire of Cyrus the Great of Persia; followed by Alexander, who spread Hellenistic culture throughout the region. Ultimately the birth of Islam, and the subsequent split between Sunni and Shia, led to the formation of the modern Middle East. But first Bull delineates the culmination of all these cultures' rich cross-pollination in "the glory of medieval Islam" (850 to 1150 C.E.) and the transmission of "the Iranian genius" across the region. He explains how an impecunious Briton named Austen Henry Layard finally managed to get backing from England's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire to dig up ruins of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, which “rewrote the history of the world" in the mid-19th century. Bull fast-forwards from there to the crowning of King Faisal I in 1921, then to Iraqi independence, eclipsed by the bloody coup of 1958.
Engaging research and bottomless detail by an avid observer and student of the region.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162502
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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