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
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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