Nuanced and deeply intelligent—a view of Egyptian politics that sometimes seems to look at everything but and that opens...
The New Yorker staff writer recounts five years of work as a correspondent in Egypt, where he witnessed the events of the so-called Cairo Spring.
The great struggle of Egypt, suggests Hessler (Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, 2013, etc.) over the course of this long but economically written study, is both to forge a national identity and to enter history—the history that one can record accurately, that is. On the second matter, the author looks deeply into the Egyptian past and the pharaonic notion that the past is never even past but instead “exists forever in the present.” It would also seem to be open to interpretation; Hessler opened a textbook to find that, as if by miracle, Egypt won the October War of 1973, which “actually ended with the Egyptian Third Army surrounded by the Israelis.” So it is that Egyptian museums display but don’t really interpret the past, even as that textbook noted, in passing, “Whoever has no history has no present.” All of these ponderings have bearing on what Hessler witnesses on the streets of Cairo and surrounding small towns as Islamists battle modernist reformers and members of the old post-Nasserite regime, each with a different view of what it means to be an Egyptian—in some instances of which former “fellaheen,” or “peasants,” actually claim descent not from the pharaohs but instead from the Saudis across the Red Sea. Hessler’s interlocutors are a fascinating lot, including a garbage collector who ports away his own empty bottles of beer after visits, knowing he’s going to have to do so anyway, and an Arabic-language instructor with a subtle command of politics. In the chaos of the revolution, some of those interlocutors are forced to leave, finding exile in faraway lands.
Nuanced and deeply intelligent—a view of Egyptian politics that sometimes seems to look at everything but and that opens onto an endlessly complex place and people.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55956-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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