Essential reading for anyone interested in the facts of the Benghazi attacks and in the future of a definitively troubled...
A searing tale of violence, chaos, and unintended consequences in post-Gadhafi Libya.
Partisan outbursts aside, the Benghazi uprising of Sept. 11, 2012, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, was a development that was bound to happen. By the account of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace senior fellow Wehrey (Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings, 2013), the American government had been tinkering in Libyan affairs for a long time, nominally shoring up the Gadhafi regime while funding groups opposed to it. Finally, when the dictator was overthrown and executed a little less than a year before the Benghazi attack, the door was opened to a resistance led by the Islamic State group, allowing it “to establish its strongest branch outside Iraq and Syria.” IS has been a destabilizing element ever since, and no amount of American intervention has been able to quell the chaos. Reporting on the ground, the Arab-speaking author looks at some of the players in the post-Gadhafi nation, including Gen. Khalifa Haftar and the Islamic scholar Aref Ali Nayed, who impressed U.S. diplomats with PowerPoint-driven agendas for rebuilding Libya until he got around to asking for weapons: “the specter of Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi and his personal militia, the Iraqi National Congress, leapt to mind.” In 2015, Wehrey writes, American special forces entered Libya to assess the militias they had engaged with during the time of the revolution only to discover that “the roster of players had changed completely.” Even with the author’s careful guidance, readers will need a score card to keep up with this shifting cast and its various aims. For the moment, though, this careful account of the Benghazi attack itself, the central episode in this capable book, is as good as there is, untangling a complex storyline while taking care not to descend into finger-pointing.
Essential reading for anyone interested in the facts of the Benghazi attacks and in the future of a definitively troubled region.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27824-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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