An able contribution to the history of the modern Middle East.
A study of the brief 1973 war that yielded a pyrrhic victory, of sorts, for both Israel and its Arab foes.
Israeli journalist Rabinovich, who covered the war for the Jerusalem Post, suggests that the combined attack of Egypt and Syria (and, later, Jordan and Iraq) on Israel was the result of failed diplomacy on the part of both sides: Israel would not budge from the territories it had conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War, and a shamed Egypt would not entertain the thought that Israel might have a point in wanting buffer zones between its national borders and Anwar Sadat’s Soviet-equipped armies. Although signs of the impending attack were abundant, and although an enigmatic Egyptian spy had revealed plans for the assault to Israeli intelligence agents, the war still caught Israel by surprise; heads would roll in the aftermath, even if Israeli intelligence chief Eli Zeira, “whose misreading of enemy intentions was the most palpable failure of the war, had a highly rewarding career after his forced retirement from the army as an intelligence consultant to foreign governments.” Rabinovich does a fine job of describing the war as it unfolded on the ground, moving from firefight to firefight and crediting both Israeli and Arab soldiers for great acts of bravery under fire; if his account is rather less dramatic than Howard Blum’s Eve of Destruction (p. 1053), which covers much the same ground, it will be particularly useful for those interested in battlefield strategy and tactics. Though Israel eventually broke the combined offensive and even had a chance at staging a counterinvasion, writes Rabinovich, the victory was extraordinarily costly: as he notes, the war, which lasted just short of three weeks, cost Israel three times as many soldiers per capita as the US lost in ten years in Vietnam.
An able contribution to the history of the modern Middle East.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-8052-4176-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
HISTORY | MILITARY | 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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