by Stuart H. Newberger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A capably sorted delineation of a complex, important court case against Libyan terrorism that required years to extract...
The story of a 1989 plane crash that killed 170 people and eventually became “the greatest murder case in French history.”
Unlike the Lockerbie airline disaster of late 1988—when Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb, crashing into Lockerbie, Scotland, and killing 270 people—a similar terrorist attack, on UTA Flight 772, en route to Paris from Chad, which wrecked in the desert of Niger a few months later, did not garner such sensational news. Both bombs were ultimately tied to Libyan terrorists acting from the top down. In fact, as attorney Newberger painstakingly chronicles in his first book, the crashing of Flight 772 on Sept. 19, 1989, was completely overshadowed by the Lockerbie tragedy. The author, who also represented terrorist hostage Terry Anderson in his case against Iran in the early 1990s, recounts the process the attorney underwent, thanks to some committed American diplomats, State Department lawyers, and brave victims’ families, to seek accountability from Libya and win an even larger settlement than that for the Lockerbie victims, a settlement extracted from Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. The suit, Pugh v. Libya (2003), was started by Douglas Matthews, a former pilot–turned–aircraft company owner who had owned the DC-10 craft that crashed in the desert; in 2002, he approached Newberger to investigate a possible legal claim against Libya. Drawing from the extensive criminal research conducted since the crash, the author and his clients put together a strong case, as he delineates here. It is a detail-rich forensic process—fascinating and, ultimately, rewarding, despite the upper-echelon government deals with Gadhafi, who cooperated solely to finagle an end to U.N. sanctions.
A capably sorted delineation of a complex, important court case against Libyan terrorism that required years to extract accountability and compensation for the victims.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78607-092-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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by Maya Angelou and illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
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