Little encouraging news but brilliantly delivered.
The bestselling author specializing in geopolitics returns to the Middle East to deliver another tour de force.
Drawing on 50 years of experience interviewing officials, intellectuals, historians, and fellow journalists and reading seemingly every history and scholarly work from Herodotus to Gibbon to Toynbee, Kaplan is convinced that “the big story in the Middle East today is not necessarily the failure of democracy—but the departure of empire.” After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Britain and France had their moments, followed by the U.S and the Soviet Union. The 1991 Soviet collapse and disastrous U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan delivered the kiss of death, so “for the first time in modern history the region is in a post-imperial phase.” Western scholars deplore empires, but nations with an ancient imperial tradition (Turkey, Iran, China) have no doubt that the world can benefit from their cultures. That humans yearn for democracy is a peculiarly Western fantasy. In reality, given a choice between dictatorship and disorder, a large percentage of the population, Americans included, prefers the former. In Turkey, Recep Erdoğan has been in office for two decades, evolving into another democratically elected autocrat. He has embraced Islamism, reversed national idol Kemal Ataturk’s fierce secularization, and revived the expansiveness of the former Ottoman Empire, which Turks have always admired. Egypt is still recovering from the Arab Spring, during which the Muslim Brotherhood won a free election but could not establish order, so most Egyptians did not object when the nation’s military returned to power. Kaplan points out that the U.S. regularly denounces lack of democracy throughout this region, from Libya to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and Iraq, apparently unaware that this would mean government by Islamists whose rule in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan does not inspire confidence. American officials urge these nations to adopt progressive policies absent in the U.S. until recently. As always, the author offers much food for thought about a variety of geopolitical issues.
Little encouraging news but brilliantly delivered.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9780593242797
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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