Essential for readers walking the minefield of U.S.-Arab relations—for anyone trying to follow the news.
Eye-popping peregrinations in places where people are most likely to succeed in hating Americans—and in killing us, too.
Soviet-born, Rome-resident Wall Street Journal correspondent Trofimov—his Italian passport comes in handy, we see—has been traveling about the Muslim world for years, speaks Arabic and knows his way around the Arab street. It’s a dusty road, filled with people who have lately come to dislike the U.S., thanks to “a nagging suspicion among some Muslims, a firm belief among others, that what started as a war against terrorism in 2001 is mutating into an intractable, almost apocalyptic conflict between the West and Islam.” But out in the tonier neighborhoods, where the doctors and government folk live, hating Americans has been de rigueur for years now; even the staff of the Jeddah Chuck E. Cheese, by Trofimov’s account, is likely to assume that any Westerner is a Zionist spy. The fact is, several interviewees suggest, the greater the American influence in the region, the more likely it is that Islamists will flourish. (Not all Americans are verboten: one semiofficial Yemeni newspaper Trofimov thumbs through features a long op-ed piece by Klansman David Duke.) Trofimov roams the Arab world looking for evidence of how we’re doing out there. The answer is not encouraging: having weathered ethnic slaughter, many Bosnian Muslims are drifting into the fundamentalist camp; secular democracies such as Tunisia are steadily losing ground to the mullahs; a steadily poorer Saudi Arabia is ever more “defiantly different from the West in its core”; the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, where, relative to the size of the force there, American casualties are as high as in Iraq, while in Iraq, those who were supposed to cheer our liberating them are counting coup on the bodies of our soldiers. As one mullah says, “We only believe in American technology. We don’t believe in American democracy, because the Americans themselves don’t have any.”
Essential for readers walking the minefield of U.S.-Arab relations—for anyone trying to follow the news.Pub Date: May 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7754-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
