Despite daunting challenges facing the new nation, Vertin offers hope that a viable state can prevail.
A keen observer of the unfolding South Sudan crisis and participant in the peace effort chronicles the making of the fledgling state and its subsequent disintegration.
Having worked in Sudan and South Sudan between 2009 and 2017, specifically as a government envoy on behalf of President Barack Obama’s Department of State during the crucial South Sudan peace process of 2014-2016, Vertin displays enormous affection and concern for the fate of this fragile new state. Seceding from Africa’s then-largest country, Sudan, by overwhelming popular referendum on July 9, 2011, after “generations of repression and neglect,” South Sudan was created in a blur of U.S.–supported optimism. However, the new country, dominated by the ethnic groups Dinka and Nuer and led by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, suffered the “resource curse” of many oil-rich African countries and descended quickly into corruption and poor nation-building strategies. Employing numerous interviews with key players, the author divides his work into two parts. In the first part, he chronicles the forging of the young country, initially under the Marxist rhetoric of “national liberation” formulated by the SPLM’s founder, John Garang, whose first commitment was to the Soviet Union before its fall and subsequent reorienting of power dynamics. Following Garang’s sudden death in a helicopter crash in 2005, there was “an eight-year factional battle inside an ethnically, ideologically, and professionally heterogeneous SPLM,” henceforth steered by the “accidental president” Salva Kiir. The SPLM power struggle and continuing tension with Sudan propelled South Sudan into chaos and violence by the summer of 2013. The second part of the book examines the peace talks begun in January 2014, which lasted two years, largely forged by diplomats in the U.S., Ethiopia, and the U.N. The author deftly explores how the “deal left much to be desired” in terms of state formation.
Despite daunting challenges facing the new nation, Vertin offers hope that a viable state can prevail.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-051-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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 Yorkerstaff 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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