Makes a strong case for the Carter Center as an effective tool for international diplomacy, human welfare and social reform.
The former president surveys 25 years of global good works, both political and humanitarian.
After leaving the White House, Carter (Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, 2005, etc.) wished to create a nonpartisan agency dedicated to action in the service of peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, environmental quality, nuclear-arms control and the alleviation of suffering from disease. So was born the Carter Center, an institution designed to be subtle and respectful of cultural byways, knowledgeable and sophisticated regarding the complexity of intervening in international affairs, admonitory when necessary, unbending in its core values. In a series of stories, he describes the Center’s work and the specific ways in which it’s carried out. (Carter, normally a fireside-worthy chatter, can be awkward here: “I awoke one night and sat up in bed, surprising Rosalynn….‘What’s the matter, Jimmy? Are you ill or did you have a nightmare?’ ”) These tales provide a ground-level view of the action, much of it edge-of-the-seat and not a little dangerous. Carter rekindled the Camp David Accords when he felt the Reagan administration was dragging its feet. He also tweaked the State Department’s nose by traveling to North Korea to discuss nuclear armament and he castigates President Bush for deriding peace efforts with that country. He is diplomacy in motion, a come-let-us-reason-together guy, and he has been successful by any measure: averting an invasion of Haiti and calling foul in unfair elections, among other stellar moments. Explaining his controversial characterization of Israel’s “security fence” as kin to apartheid, he writes, “This configuration would severely restrict Palestinian access to the outside world and make any peace agreement almost impossible.” Occasionally, Carter falls overboard in his optimism, as when he speaks of “bringing an end to Sudan’s twenty-one-year civil war.” Readers may wonder where Darfur and slave raids figure into the picture.
Makes a strong case for the Carter Center as an effective tool for international diplomacy, human welfare and social reform.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5880-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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