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 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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