Good reading for readers interested in learning about the Saudi Arabia that lies beyond the image of a wealthy country with...
Former Wall Street Journal reporter and publisher House delivers a well-researched, informative book about Saudi Arabian society and where she believes it is headed.
The author interviewed a wide variety of Saudi Arabians, including rich and poor, Muslim fundamentalist and modern. Among the subjects is a devout Muslim woman who hosted House for several days in hopes of converting her to Islam. House was not allowed to speak to the woman’s husband and was covered from head to toe the one time she was in close quarters with him. On the other end of the spectrum, a young Saudi Arabian female journalist runs an all-girls soccer team, goes to private beaches and has dinner with male friends. She leads a life resembling that of any young woman in the West. House also interviewed reformed terrorists whom the Saudi Arabian government provided with jobs and homes in exchange for repenting. She follows developments in women’s rights, such as efforts to change the court system, which favors males. House succeeds in capturing the diversity of Saudi society, painting a more complex picture than the caricature of oil wells and extreme wealth, but a smug authorial tone occasionally creeps in. She references the “passivity” of Saudi people in relation to their government, as if overthrowing a dictator who has no qualms about cutting off people’s limbs is an easy task. House claims that the country demonstrates Marx’s statement about religion being the opium of the masses, a contention that disregards how a ruthless religious dictatorship can enforce religious practices. Fortunately, for most of the book, House sticks to the facts.
Good reading for readers interested in learning about the Saudi Arabia that lies beyond the image of a wealthy country with unlimited money from oil, but some of the author’s opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-27216-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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