A highly knowledgeable history that is helpful in explaining recent developments in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Sociological/historical study of the “two leading social movements in the Arab world,” Islamism and nationalism.
Gerges (Contemporary Middle East Studies/London School of Economics; ISIS: A History, 2016, etc.) examines the rise of revolutionary Islamism as a reaction to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brand of socialism. The rise of that fundamentalist religious ideology, personified by the cleric and firebrand Sayyid Qutb, is not without its ironies, one of them the fact that Nasser and Qutb shared many ideas. However, each was personally ambitious, and when Nasser came to power, among his first acts was to rid Egypt of potentially rivalrous political parties, from the Marxists on the left to the Ikhwan, which morphed into the Muslim Brotherhood. None of the struggle was inevitable, but, as Gerges notes, the convoluted path taken by these two powerful and uncompromising men led to a profound breach that culminated in the often imprisoned Qutb’s execution in 1966 for allegedly plotting Nasser’s assassination. The following year, when Egypt was among the Arab powers to be humiliated in a war against Israel, Islamism gained new strength. Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, attempted to co-opt Ikhwan followers and was assassinated, while, later, Mohamed Morsi, president until his ouster in 2013, was an outright member of the Brotherhood. Gerges observes that Nasser’s pan-Arab ideology amounted to an anti-imperialism of a kind not seen in the region before, but that did not necessarily equate to anti-Westernism. “Nasser’s generation of anti-colonial nationalists deployed universal concepts of self-determination, popular sovereignty, popular democracy, resistance, and anti-hegemony as effective weapons,” he writes, whereas the Ikhwan counted the West among its enemies, subscribed to the notion of the clash of civilizations, and believed that constitutionalism was a foreign concept to be suppressed. The struggle continues today, with modern representatives of both Islamism and nationalism contending for leadership in what amounts to a regional cold war.
A highly knowledgeable history that is helpful in explaining recent developments in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-16788-6
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | 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 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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