Solid account of Egypt's still-developing political transformation and how it has related to the United States.
Gardner (History/Rutgers Univ.; The Long Road to Baghdad: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy from the 1970s to the Present, 2010, etc.) has written extensively on the history of the Middle East, especially the time since World War II. Here he brings that experience to bear on the recent developments in Egypt and elsewhere in the region—a series of uprisings dubbed the “Arab Spring.” The author examines the international exigencies that have bound proponents of national independence and self-determination in the aftermath of the war, and he situates the downfall of Hosni Mubarak in the context of the paradoxes that American policies placed on the country since the end of the war. Gardner addresses many historical and political threads, including the consequences of the collapse of the British Empire and its replacement by the U.S., which had different priorities during the Cold War, when promotion of radical Islam as a movement against communism was affected also by the need to cooperate with the British over military bases and strategy. For Egypt, this translated into a choice between leading the Arab world, or simply remaining a somewhat inconsequential Nile River Valley country. The author also looks at deeper concerns regarding the transformation of a region whose politics have been based, especially since 1947, on three differing and conflicted allies of the U.S.: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Gardner ably pursues strategy and context as sources of political constraint and tension, providing a useful overview of Egypt’s dealings with the U.S. Pair with Steven A. Cook’s The Struggle for Egypt (2011), which provides greater detail on the variegated inputs at the local level.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-721-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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