A journalistic expert on the Middle East delivers more bad news from the region.
An unsettling look at the extraordinarily brutal civil war that has engulfed Syria since 2011.
On one side is Bashar al-Assad, a dictator with support from Iran and Russia. On the other side is a collection of Syrian rebels aided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. but also including units from al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. The U.S. abandoned military support in 2017 and now largely confines itself to humanitarian aid. In this highly disturbing yet significant text, Warrick, a two-time Pulitzer-winning journalist for the Washington Post who has spent years investigating the Middle East and national security issues, concentrates on one particularly horrific aspect: the Syrian military’s use of poison gas, locally produced since the 1980s. “By the early 2000s,” writes the author, “the network of laboratories and production centers gradually blossomed into a mature manufacturing complex that encompassed some forty buildings and storage bunkers at two dozen secret locations scattered across the country.” Warrick powerfully describes gruesome details of the first attacks in 2013, during which nerve gas killed thousands, mostly civilians. Despite universal outrage in the U.S., the miserable experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan led to overwhelming opposition to military action. Perhaps as a public relations gesture, Russia agreed that Syria would, under U.N. supervision, dismantle their chemical program. This turned out to be vastly more complex than predicted, and Warrick delivers a vivid account as experts crisscrossed the country to oversee the destruction. By June 2014, trucks carrying 1,300 tons of deadly chemicals had unloaded their cargo onto ships, where complex machinery converted deadly chemicals into merely toxic waste. Almost immediately, Assad’s army turned to chlorine gas, which was available on the commercial market. After a few years, nerve gas reappeared because Assad had kept a few factories in reserve, but by that time, he was near victory thanks to generous Russian and Iranian support. Warrick concludes that America’s intervention in Iraq led to disaster, but refusal to intervene in Syria has done the same.
A journalistic expert on the Middle East delivers more bad news from the region.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54446-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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