Forthright account by an invested journalist unafraid to ask key questions about the many ramifications of the conflict.
An embedded war and terrorism reporter reveals wrenching, in-the-trenches stories of “retribution and atonement” by people on all sides of the struggle against the Islamic State group.
As Atlantic staff writer Giglio—who previously served as an Istanbul-based foreign correspondent for Newsweek and BuzzFeed—observed firsthand, Iraqi forces declaring victory against the IS caliphate in summer 2017 “brought urban destruction reminiscent of World War II.” In his debut book, the author begins before he traveled to the region, during the Arab Spring of 2011, when the young Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, made his crushingly disappointing speech that essentially set his authoritarian course. In that speech, writes Giglio, “he threatened the protestors and any Syrian who supported them.” The author arrived in Turkey in July 2012 and observed the crisis of refugees fleeing Syria as the civil war erupted. His intimate conversations record people trapped in the brutalization of war. For example, there is young Egyptian journalist Shawkan, who was rounded up with Giglio during street protests in Cairo. Unlike the American journalist, who was quickly released, Shawkan remained in prison over the next five years and suffered torture, becoming “pale and haggard, fading like a memory.” Giglio watched as IS emerged, full of young, idealistic members who were ruthless in their agenda of fear, which included attacks on the Kurds, the massacre of Yazidis, and beheadings of Western captives. This stream of atrocities “shocked governments around the world into action.” The author notes that if IS had not embarked on this erratic swing, the caliphate might have lasted. Through his interviews, Giglio offers a good sense of the underground oil economy fueling IS and the pillaging of Syria. Throughout, he reflects the great human complexity of this story, which also included terrorist attacks in Europe. The glossary of terms at the beginning of the book is helpful.
Forthright account by an invested journalist unafraid to ask key questions about the many ramifications of the conflict.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4235-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
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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