Hussein’s legacy, Shlaim holds, is “the possibility, at least, of peace in the Middle East,” toward which he contributed a...
A comprehensive, highly readable life of the well-known but much-overlooked Middle Eastern leader.
Middle Eastern politics is endlessly complex. Born in Baghdad, raised in Israel, educated in Britain and now a resident of Germany, Shlaim (International Relations, Oxford; The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, 2000, etc.) is well equipped to comprehend and convey just how tortuous its routes can be. Modern Jordan began as a British-governed bulwark against Saudi expansionism, a defense against their “pristine and puritanical brand of Islam.” By the time Hussein bin Talal (1935–99) ascended to the throne of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1953, his nation stood between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on one side and Israel on the other. In the greater scheme of the “Arabian Cold War” that would soon develop, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia were friendly with the West, while Syria, Egypt and Iraq favored the Soviets. All were to some degree hostile to Israel, though once Jordan tasted defeat in the 1967 war—a conflict, Shlaim writes, born of “Arab overconfidence and Arab overbidding” that proved largely that the Arab states “cannot act separately and they cannot act collectively”—Hussein became increasingly committed to seeking peace, not least because so many Jordanians were now dispossessed Palestinians opposed to his rule. Regrettably, Shlaim writes, Israeli intransigence worked against peace. Hussein was constantly underestimated and shoved aside, while American diplomats such as George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton viewed him as a minor character in the larger drama of world politics. Sharper attention turned to King Hussein when it appeared he was aligning Jordan with Iraq during the first Gulf War, though, Shlaim suggests, Hussein was not wrong to disdain the Kuwaiti ruling family.
Hussein’s legacy, Shlaim holds, is “the possibility, at least, of peace in the Middle East,” toward which he contributed a share—indeed, a lion’s share. A worthy biography.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4305-7
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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