First-rate frontline reportage, full of luminous and eye-opening details.
A reporter’s notebook documents life in Iraq before and during the current war.
It seems telling, if strange, that Saddam Hussein’s so-called Triumph Leader Museum—devoted to himself, naturally—contained trophy cases full of gifts from foreign leaders: “a pair of decorative riding spurs which, according to the museum labels, were a 1986 gift from Ronald Reagan; a collection of guabayera shirts from Fidel Castro . . . ceremonial swords from Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Zhirinovsky.” Hussein’s hold on Iraq, suggests New Yorker correspondent Anderson (The Lion’s Grave, 2002, etc.), owed much to such legitimating kindness, enabling the dictator to lord it over his people with astonishing comprehensiveness. And with considerable leeway: on receiving 100 percent of the vote in the last election, Anderson writes, Hussein freed all but a few inmates from the now doubly notorious Abu Ghraib prison, saying that they were no threat to anyone; explained prime minister Tariq Aziz, “We are like Jesus Christ, who pardoned the people who crucified him.” Hussein was anything but Christlike, though, says Anderson, who suggests that Iraq did indeed have the WMDs that have so far eluded Western investigators—and, moreover, sheds no tears for the fall of the tyrant. Still, and interestingly, his pages are full of veiled warnings from Iraqis about what lies in store for any would-be occupier—“If you do anything in Iraq, do it quickly,” says one—and, ominously, about what lies in store for the world should Islamic fundamentalism replace secular government. Anderson’s descriptions of the American “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad are stunning (“Saddam’s palace complex was littered with the smoking hulks of bombed buildings. I noticed that Iraqis did not gather to stare at the damage, but cast fleeting, sidelong looks at it”), though his account of events subsequent to the invasion will disquiet anyone who supports a continued American presence there: as he suggests at the close, “a year after the fall of Baghdad, it seemed as if the city had not really fallen at all. Or, perhaps it was still falling.”
First-rate frontline reportage, full of luminous and eye-opening details.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-034-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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