A mixed bag, but, at its strongest moments, a modern rejoinder to I.F. Stone’s In a Time of Torment.
“The world is sick. It cannot be cured with America’s new war.” So writes Nation magazine commentator Schell (The Unconquerable World, 2003, etc.) in this selection of his post–9/11 columns.
Schell sounds several themes that were once lonely cries in a time of jingoist bluster: military escalation and action against the Muslim world is ill-advised; war is not the answer; the world has ample cause to mistrust and even hate the US; “the bombing should stop, and a new policy—perhaps one of armed humanitarian intervention on the ground—should be adopted”; the rise of terrorism provides yet more reason for nuclear disarmament, before someone gets hurt. Such views have become more current in the months since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but at the time Schell was in a distinct minority. Refreshingly, he allows some of his missed or arguable calls to stand in these pages: his view that the American bombing campaign would rally Afghans to the Taliban, for instance, and his apparent acceptance of the notion that Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il had stores of WMDs and were about to use them. But, more to the point, he records the errors of others, observing that the proffered reasons for going to war were wrong and misleading (writing in June 2003, he notes, for instance, “Hans Blix . . . never stated, as the Bush Administration did, that there were weapons of mass destruction but only that there was some evidence that there might be weapons of mass destruction”). Many of those others are fellow media pundits—Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Christopher Hitchens, et al.—and Schell’s critiques are often right on the money. Indeed, they make the best parts here, the sum of which is mostly useful as a record of who said what and as a work of media criticism, a chastisement of those who should have recognized a lie but instead served it.
A mixed bag, but, at its strongest moments, a modern rejoinder to I.F. Stone’s In a Time of Torment.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-600-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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