None
In Carter, the US had a Christian president for whom biblical history was as real as it was for his Muslim and Jewish opposite-numbers, Egypt's Sadat and Israel's Begin: hence the titular image of three peoples, three faiths with a single source. But, as Carter was to discover, the political world is more complicated. "My early optimism in dealing with Assad and the entire Middle East question was unjustified," he writes apropos of his meeting with Syria's president in 1977. "Without my overconfidence, however, I would probably not have been willing to explore the opportunities that did exist." Most of the book is potted history—repotted, as Carter recognizes, to present the Middle East problem successively from the Israeli, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian points of view. He's had help from area-specialists, and there is little with which to quibble in these summaries of Mideast conflict from the Roman occupation through the Ottoman and colonial periods to Jewish settlement of Palestine, Israeli independence, the Arab-Israeli wars, and the impasse over Palestinian nationalism. Internal developments in each country are reasonably indicated too—up to Israeli rifts over Lebanon but not including Egyptian disaffection with Sadat, which Carter cannot or will not see. (His attempt to be up-to-the-minute has dated the book already—viz, the Israeli pullout from Lebanon—but he's to be commended for forthrightly mentioning the date of writing.) His conclusions are equally unremarkable: in brief, the Arab nations must recognize Israel's right to exist; Israel must recognize the Palestinian right to "self-determination"; and the US must somehow take a hand. But, going back, there are numerous inconsistencies and contradictions. Assad's 1977 readiness to consider a non-PLO Palestinian presence at prospective Geneva peace talks ("the main obstacle") ended at Sadat's unilateral visit to Jerusalem. Begin's invocation of biblical history was such as to block implementation of the Camp David accords in regard to Palestinian self-determination—and even bring a call for absorption of the East Bank (i.e., Jordan). As for a major US role: "The judgments concerning what is best for Israel will be made in Jerusalem"—Washington's influence is "sometimes embarrassingly slight," Arab leaders doubt the US will exert effective pressure. So we are where we have been for some time: what Carter has done is to explain the stalemate multilaterally, in least-common-denominator terms. . . without the canniness (or hard-headedness) of the adversaries: on a 1983 visit to Jerusalem, he's outraged when an Israeli soldier accompanying him on his morning jogging swerves ("the sidewalk was wide enough for us to pass easily") to knock newspapers out of the hands of curbside Arab readers. Carter sees callousness, arrogance, humiliation; the soldier sees cover for guns. Still: a creditable work of popular instruction, by a celebrated author.
None NonePub Date: April 2, 1985
ISBN: 1557282935
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
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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