Useful if discomfiting reading for State Department types—and, perhaps, us all.
The “current course of the Bush administration in the Middle East is a doomed one,” writes Khalidi (Arab Studies/Columbia Univ.; Palestinian Identity, 1997).
There are many historical reasons for being uneasy over the administration’s invasion of Iraq, among other actions in the region. But Americans seem to be manifestly allergic to historical facts, with the result, writes Khalidi, that “all too much of the extensive public debate about the relationship between the US and the Middle East, particularly since September 11, 2001, has been taking place in a historical vacuum.” If Americans don’t have much sense for history, the peoples of the Middle East surely do; they have a long memory for victories, and an even longer one for slights and injuries. Khalidi observes that America was generally well liked in the region until the beginning of the Cold War, when the rhetoric of coming as liberators was replaced by the reality of propping up corrupt dictators and staging coups in the name of containing the Soviet Union; whereas many older Middle Easterners, writes the author, have a memory of living under more or less democratic and constitutional systems of government, younger ones do not, and all share a sense that the US had something to do with their demise. Khalidi explores some of the recent history of the region, offering tantalizing asides that beg for elaboration, as when he notes that Saddam Hussein was once “among [Ba’th] party members colluding with the CIA in 1962 and 1963,” pushed into the Soviet camp by American favoritism for the Shah of Iran. In the face of intransigent unilateralism today, Khalidi suggests that the US strike a more balanced position vis-à-vis the Arab powers and Israel and that Iraq come under temporary international administration rather than American military occupation.
Useful if discomfiting reading for State Department types—and, perhaps, us all.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8070-0234-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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