With violence erupting in Europe and America’s new anti-immigration policies, this audacious work will find its readers.
A timely work that blames Europe’s current immigration disaster on the Europeans’ misplaced guilt and fatally good intentions.
With the massive influx of refugees from the world’s war-torn zones deluging migration points and asylum centers across Europe, Spectator associate editor Murray (Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, 2012, etc.) takes a stance that few dare to take, as it is firmly not politically correct. Indeed, using examples from places he has visited—Lampedusa, Italy, a ferrying point from North Africa; Lesbos, Greece; Berlin; London; and elsewhere—the author surveys the movements of asylum seekers during the last few years especially and the inadequate accommodations for them. He claims, perhaps rightly, that most of the immigrants are Muslim, most are young men with little to sustain them, most are seeking economic betterment rather than asylum from life-threatening causes, and most will disappear through the legal cracks because of the inability of the host countries to process the overwhelming numbers. The result, Murray warns by citing dire demographic numbers, is essentially a dilution of European culture—that is, white Greco-Judeo-Christian culture, which believes in liberalism, secularism, and human rights, including equal rights for women. Instead, the author writes, Europeans, denying their best instincts and led by Germany’s Angela Merkel, are hogtied by “the tyranny of guilt,” in the form of the consequences of World War II, the legacy of colonialism, and the enslavement of indigenous peoples. While the good leaders of Britain, Germany, and other countries claim that their nations need immigration for economic growth and to bolster an aging population, Murray sees “obvious” crises such as housing and school shortages and rapidly increasing health care costs to these welfare states. He also sees “parallel communities” developing everywhere, crucibles of radicalism and crime that the mainstream dares not report due to the fear of political backlash.
With violence erupting in Europe and America’s new anti-immigration policies, this audacious work will find its readers.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-4224-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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 Yorkerstaff 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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