As complete a portrait of an elusive autocrat as can be expected.
A chilling look at the ascent of the current young prince of Saudi Arabia to first-in-line to succession.
Hubbard, the New York Times Beirut chief who has been reporting from the Middle East for more than a decade, is perfectly positioned to observe the rise of Mohammed bin Salman since the accession of his father to the role of king in 2015. Mohammed, the favored son though far from being the eldest, had stuck by his father’s side through his early years, eschewing a foreign education for a Saudi inculcation in the ways his father, then the governor of Riyadh Province, preferred. When his father became king, writes the author in this authoritative biographical picture, he put MBS in command of “the kingdom’s most important portfolios: defense, economy, religion and oil. Then, shoving aside older relatives, he became the crown prince, putting him next in line to the throne. His father remained the head of state, but it was clear that Prince Mohammed was the hands-on ruler, the kingdom’s overseer and CEO.” At first, some international leaders admired the prince as a “game-changer” in a sclerotic Saudi male hierarchy, young and unafraid to “defang” the dreaded religious police and lure investors. The mood had shifted by November 2017, however, when the young prince engineered the imprisonment of hundreds of the richest men in the country in the Ritz-Carlton of Riyadh and forcibly shook them down. Sentiment continued to turn with the Oct. 2, 2018, murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the most prominent critic of MBS and the royal family. “Khashoggi’s killing was a wake-up call,” writes Hubbard. “In a few weeks, it flushed away much of the goodwill and excitement that MBS had spent the last four years generating.” Throughout, the author, synthesizing information gleaned from hundreds of interviews, displays his impressive diligence as a journalist continually blocked by censorship and intimidation.
As complete a portrait of an elusive autocrat as can be expected.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2382-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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