A knowledgeable journalist astutely delineates a troubling global move toward the right wing.
A Kashmiri journalist examines a new generation of tyrants threatening the (illusory) promises of liberal democracy.
Columbia University–trained, New Delhi–based journalist Peer (Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland, 2010) focuses on alarming authoritarian developments in India under Narendra Modi, chief of the right-wing nationalist BJP party and prime minister since 2014, and in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the head of the AKP party, which has been in power since 2002. In both cases, the author traces their respective paths to power, political promises and deceptions, and oppositions. In Modi’s case, the Gujarat-based politician was anointed successor to Lal Krishna Advani, a leading Hindu nationalist politician, and thus owes “a debt that would see a massive payoff.” The horrendous violence of early 2002 in Godhra between Hindu activists and Muslim tea vendors, resulting in roughly 1,000 mostly Muslim deaths, was largely blamed on Modi’s complicity and political patronage, and the event has continued to haunt his leadership. Modi’s promises for economic order and better infrastructure seem to have canceled out concerns about sectarian violence. Yet Modi’s xenophobia and intimidation of intellectuals and activists, such as Rohith Vemula and Kashmiri rebel Burhan Wani, underscore a dark aspect to his populist regime. In Turkey, Erdo?an’s embrace of the European Union, emphasis on infrastructure, ostensible democratic reforms, and marriage of “moderate Islam and market-friendly policies” obscure his authoritarian tendencies, including corruption, harsh crackdowns on any opposition, and the suppression of non-Turkish minorities like the Kurds. Peer examines how Erdo?an’s relationship with one-time ally Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher with powerful followers, degenerated into mutual hostility. The flood of refugees into Turkey has only exacerbated the prime minister’s strongman proclivities.
A knowledgeable journalist astutely delineates a troubling global move toward the right wing.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9971264-2-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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