Dense, scholarly, and bizarrely compelling.
A painstakingly researched examination of a “never-before-studied” collection of 1,500 audiotapes detailing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida’s theoretical and organizational development.
Linguistic anthropologist Miller (Religious Studies/Univ. of California, Davis; The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen, 2007, etc.) has managed to get access to the cache of cassettes first acquired by CNN from bin Laden’s residential compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in early 2002, then shipped to Williams College, where the author first archived them. The audio library, intended for disciples of bin Laden and made between 1997 and 2001, contains only 24 tapes of bin Laden. The wealth of lectures are by hundreds of different speakers, mostly academic, on the nature of Islamic law and ritual practice, and they even record some seemingly insignificant extemporaneous conversations in kitchens or taxis, over telephone calls, at weddings and celebrations after combat missions. As such, the cache provides an enormously nuanced portrait of the thinking behind the group’s operations. While the West has latched on to bin Laden’s avowed anti-American platform (which emerged after 1996), he styled himself first and foremost “an ascetic warrior dedicated to the global Islamic struggle,” with its apostates being within the Muslim community itself. With daunting thoroughness, Miller reviews bin Laden’s biography, underscoring his adherence to the Islamic reform movement that supported insurgencies in authoritarian regimes within the Muslim world. Expelled from Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was often rendered stateless. During this key period, his community of like-minded ascetics used historic examples to preach “a code of ascetic virtues,” which included denouncing the “wealth and palaces of this world” and boycotting American goods. Moving chronologically in the recordings, Miller gives a multilayered sense of how al-Qaida actually developed.
Dense, scholarly, and bizarrely compelling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-026436-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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