Scholarly but accessible and of much interest to those with an eye on geopolitical matters.
Sober-minded history of a nation that has existed in its present form for less than a century, one “predestined to descend into chaos and civil war.”
What is Syria? Like so many political entities in the Middle East, it is the product of lines on colonial maps drawn according to the tenets of division and conquest. However, warns London-based Arabist and attorney McHugo (A Concise History of the Arabs, 2013), it would be a mistake to think that simply redrawing the map could redress that country’s terrible problems, one of them being the fact that some 40 percent of the population has been displaced to some degree or another in the last three years of civil war. Repartitioning the country, he warns, carries numerous drawbacks: “This is an outbreak of the old Western disease of drawing pretty lines on maps and then expecting the peoples of Greater Syria to step neatly into the zones marked with the particular color chosen for them.” Those colors are widely varied, for Syria contains numerous kinds of people: Christians and Muslims in various strains, Jews and Zoroastrians, Kurds and Palestinians, and many more. McHugo charts the slowly building tragedy that has set these peoples far apart, beginning when the country’s first ruler “recognized no distinctions between the three monotheistic religions, and that all were equal and entitled to the same rights and subject to the same duties.” Sadly, that ecumenical view disappeared with the rise of Ba’ath party nationalism, which blended elements of Arab revanchism and Western socialism in an uneasy alliance that would yield the likes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, both of which played proxy roles in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and continue to play roles in the struggle between the West and Russia today.
Scholarly but accessible and of much interest to those with an eye on geopolitical matters.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62097-045-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
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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