Policy wonkish in tone, but will appeal to followers of events in the Middle East.
Forget Stalin, Mao and Reagan. The world leader with the greatest influence on the course of the here and now may be the Ayatollah Khomeini, architect of the 1979 Iran revolution.
Khomeini, writes Takeyh (Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic, 2006), merits consideration as “one of the most successful revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century.” He also casts a shadow over current events as the tutelary spirit of Iran’s current regime, and its shadow arm, Hezbollah, which has been doing so much damage elsewhere in the region. Iran’s influence, writes Takeyh, owes a great deal to the Bush administration, which, by way of self-fulfilling prophecy, so demonized the Iranian government that a strange element came into power, exemplified by its Holocaust-denying president. “Iran has been offered unprecedented opportunities as its principal American nemesis finds itself unsure how to proceed in the Middle East,” writes Takeyh, “while its oil wealth has provided it with sufficient revenues to offset Western financial pressures.” Yet, the author counsels, Iran is not monolithic. It is full of pragmatists and even peacemakers, and it must be dealt with not as an arm of an imagined axis of evil but as a nation of considerable influence—one whose hard-line government may be forced to relax if an America that does not spoil for war or dominance suddenly figures on the scene. A friendlier Iran may, in the end, be of more influence in regional affairs than even a negotiated peace between Israel and Palestine. Two paths remain open to the younger conservatives who are now in power, Takeyh concludes: either “a more tempered relationship with the United States or open confrontation with the ‘Great Satan’ ”—a choice that will likely depend heavily on American actions.
Policy wonkish in tone, but will appeal to followers of events in the Middle East.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-532784-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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
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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