A skillfully reconstructed account of a hostage crisis and the bungling that caused it.
An investigative reporter digs into the fate of British Airways Flight 149 and its passengers and crew, whom Saddam Hussein used as “human shields” during the Gulf War.
Davis has written the closest we are likely to have to a definitive account of Britain’s calamitous decision to allow a flight from London to land in Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, hours after Iraq had invaded. After the plane touched down, Iraq took as hostages its 367 passengers and 18 crew, including British and American citizens and 11 children. Until the last were released four months later, the hostages were split up and moved repeatedly to thwart allied air attacks. In a thorough and well-paced exposé, the author convincingly rebuts Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s claims that her government failed to order the flight to divert because the invasion didn’t start until after the plane arrived in Kuwait. Drawing on more than 300 interviews with sources ranging from Flight 149’s crew and passengers to a penitent former MI6 officer, Davis offers strong evidence that the flight was instead allowed to proceed because it carried a British black-ops team mostly drawn from an ultrasecret group called the Increment or “Inc,” which Thatcher’s government wanted to have on the ground before the invasion and whose involvement was covered up in London and Washington. Davis shows vividly the cost of the official missteps in close-ups of the horrific plight of the “human shields,” some of whom were kept in squalid conditions. One group was forced to dig a trench they were told was for them; they were to be shot and buried if the invasion reached them. Britain’s blunders may have been less significant in the Gulf War than Hussein’s threat to disputed Kuwaiti oil fields, but they provide a fascinating window onto black ops’ work and hostages’ lives.
A skillfully reconstructed account of a hostage crisis and the bungling that caused it.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0005-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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