Revisionist history with a central thesis that the Crusades were among the direct determinants of latter-day strife in the Middle East. A former nun who spent seven years in an English convent, Armstrong (Through the Narrow Gate, 1981; Beginning the World, 1983), relies solely on secondary sources and insights gained during a 1983 sojourn in Israel (as producer of a Tv series on early Christianity) to make her arguable case and collateral allegations. While she offers an interpretive account of the campaigns undertaken by European soldiers of the cross in the Holy Land from 1095 through 1291, she is at least as concerned with the present and recent past, according equal attention to the modern world in general and the embattled Middle East in particular. She also offers quirky perspectives on the global village's three major monotheistic religions: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. With the deadly earnestness of a true believer, Armstrong (who is at pains to note she is no longer a believing or observant Christian) reaches any number of arresting conclusions. Characterizing the Crusades as ``a vicious Western initiative,'' she asserts, for instance, that there probably would have been no Jewish state in the Middle East if not for the perdurable anti-Semitism engendered in Europe by eastward marches during the Middle Ages. In like vein, she suggests that today's Israelis draw belligerent inspiration from the castles, churches, and cities left by Crusaders as reminders of a colonial movement that tried to establish itself in a hostile Muslim environment with powerful backing from the West. At the same time, she insists, contemporary Arabs (who despise Zionists ``as either new Crusades or as tools of Western imperialism'') continue to look for another Saladin's advent. In Armstrong's book, moreover, the Crusades (or their evangelical spirit) are a root cause of the Inquisition, the Nazi Holocaust, and a host of other recorded disasters-secular as well as militantly ecclesiastic. While the author may have lost her own vocation, she does not shrink from asking prospective pilgrims to take rather a lot on faith. The provocative, albeit tedious, text (previously published in the UK) has six helpful maps.
Pub Date: April 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-24193-3
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
