A moving, urgent work of political awareness.
A rare, terrifying glimpse inside the Islamic State group (referred to here as Daesh) by a young hounded Syrian student.
Dedicated to “Syria’s media activists,” who are routinely and viciously executed by beheading or crucifixion in Daesh-controlled areas of Syria, this moving first-person narrative is the work of the pseudonymous writer “Samer,” who was forced to flee his hometown of Raqqa after life under Daesh became unbearable. The narrative begins on March 6, 2013, when the narrator, a young man from a large family trying to attend university and help support his younger siblings, became aware of the faltering of the Free Syrian Army and the worrisome advent of the Daesh. The relentless religious police prowled the street to impose restrictive women’s dress standards and bans on smoking and possession of TVs and to extract money from businesses; many of their actions were arbitrary and vindictive. Soon it became very dangerous to utter any criticism of the new regime. Once content with the life of his parents, “with all its simplicity and innocent dreams,” Samer got caught up in Arab resistance and hindered at every step by economic plight (his father had to work two jobs to make ends meet), lack of opportunity (Samer had to give up his dreams of studying architecture), and blighted love—the one sympathetic woman he loved at the university was forced to marry a Free Syrian Army fighter in a sordid bargain to release her brother from jail. Samer’s father was denounced as a dissident by his boss and then died in a Russian-backed bombing of their family home, and many of his outspoken friends were jailed or publicly executed. The author understood that documenting and broadcasting the message of repression and murder out to the world might help save his people, if he saved his own life first (he now lives in a refugee camp in northern Syria). BBC foreign affairs correspondent Thomson provides a brief introduction.
A moving, urgent work of political awareness.Pub Date: June 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56656-005-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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