Evenhanded, diplomatic, mutually respectful and enormously useful.
A thoughtful autopsy of the failed two-state paradigm.
Having worked to promote peace within conflicts in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Iraq, O’Malley (Peace and Reconciliation/Univ. of Mass., Boston; Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa, 2007, etc.) carefully sifts through the intractable coexistence between the Palestinians and Israelis and finds both sides so traumatized by the “narrative” of their respective struggle that they are unable to view the other with respect or humanity—the beginning of true reconciliation. Both claiming to be legitimate owners of the same land, both smarting from historical injustice and both stoking their feelings of victimization, the two sides are “irreconcilable,” as they have proved through numerous failed discussions from the two Oslo Accords through recent talks held by Secretary of State John Kerry. In a work of impeccable research, featuring extensive footnotes and employing interviews of both Palestinians and Israelis, O’Malley addresses the sticking points on both sides that form the “addiction” by each to an “ethos of conflict”: the omission of the Islamist, Gaza-based Hamas from the peacemaking process, thus ignoring the “elephant in the room”; Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees or their descendants a “right to return” after the wars of 1947-1949; continued Israeli settlements by a ultraorthodox minority bent on “messianic zealotry”; a highly problematic economic sustainability in Palestine due to the “asymmetry of power” with Israel; and the “silently creeping, inexorably irreversible changes in Israel’s demographic profiles”—namely, fewer Jews and more Palestinians. O’Malley is not hopeful but rather disgusted that the two sides seem to be entrenched in their mutual hatred and absolutely unwilling to budge. To do so, he writes, requires establishing a “parity of esteem for each other’s narratives” and then perhaps a long cease-fire that would allow a new generation of leaders to step up.
Evenhanded, diplomatic, mutually respectful and enormously useful.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-02505-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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