An incisive view of the Middle East that won’t please the Pentagon or veterans of the Bush and Blair administrations.
Journalism morphs into history in this collection of the late Irish writer’s essays on the Middle East.
“I met Osama bin Laden three times,” writes Fisk, “once in Sudan and twice in Afghanistan, and he became a kind of albatross for me.” Called on frequently after September 11 to comment on the founder of al-Qaeda, he laments not having given more credence to bin Laden’s pledge to reduce the U.S. to “a shadow of itself.” Still, Fisk, who reported on the Middle East for The Independent and other UK publications for nearly half a century, allows that bin Laden had a point: the democracy-touting West came storming in after 9/11, overturning the regional balance of power. As it did so, according to his account, its actions lost any claim to the moral high ground. Fisk was one of the first to document atrocities on the part of U.S. and U.K. forces, writing sadly, “This was us. These young soldiers were our representatives in Iraq. And they had innocent blood on their hands.” The overall effect of Fisk’s present-tense historical writing—he holds a doctorate in history and is able to make deep connections between present and past—is to underscore the dangers of making too many assumptions about a much-assumed-about region. Suicide bombers, for instance, don’t bomb for the fun of it, but neither do they do so because high on drugs, brainwashed, or insane; it's because they are committed enough to their cause to die for it. Fisk’s overall conclusions, reached as the Syrian civil war blossomed, are glum: The Arab Spring is dead, the West lost, Russia and Iran won. But, he adds hopefully, “wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.”
An incisive view of the Middle East that won’t please the Pentagon or veterans of the Bush and Blair administrations.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780007255481
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
