An analysis of the evolution of US policy toward the Middle East—as well as of the foreign-policy elite that guided it—that goes far deeper than the headlines. America's concern with the Middle East, says Kaplan (Soldiers of God, 1990, etc.), began in the 19th century with the missionaries who braved great hardship, with little success, to bring the Christian message to the area. Eventually, these missionaries concluded that education might be the best way of proselytizing—a conclusion that Kaplan calls ``probably the most inspired idea in the history of foreign aid.'' More sustained American interest in the Middle East developed only after WW II, and much of the subsequent history of the ``Arabists'' is tied up with Truman's decision to recognize the State of Israel despite the almost universal opposition of his foreign-policy advisors— opposition that, according to Truman, smacked of anti-Semitism. Kaplan, himself Jewish, handles this controversy evenhandedly, and notes that then-Assistant Secretary of State Loy Henderson was remarkably prescient about the aftermath of our recognition of Israel: decades of constant trouble and expense, as well ``the rise of fanatic Mohammedanism'' of a kind ``not experienced for hundreds of years.'' In tracing the controversy over recognition, Kaplan relies particularly on interviews with leading Arabists, and he gives vivid pictures of an elite whose skills were developed by the sheer difficulty of mastering Arabic but who nonetheless have been regarded by critics like Francis Fukuyama as ``more systematically wrong'' than any other branch of the foreign service. The Arabists' story, Kaplan says, is one of dramatic successes (e.g., the extraction of the Falasha Jews from the Sudan, revealed here in all its truth perhaps for the first time) but of great failures as well (for instance, the failure to predict the true aims of Saddam Hussein). Full of fascinating, sometimes brilliant, insight into the politics of the area and its impact on those entrusted with US policy.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-916785-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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 Yorkerstaff 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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