A fine exercise in popular history, in time for the 30th anniversary of the conflict.
Failed intelligence, a surprise attack, the threat of weapons of mass destruction—and that’s just in the first few pages of this suspenseful account of the last unified Arab attempt to destroy Israel.
The failed intelligence and WMD threat both fell on Israel’s shoulders, writes Blum (The Brigade, 2001, etc.), a journalist who bears comparison to the late Leon Uris as a spinner of historical tales. Uris was free to fill in the gaps with characters of his own invention, but Blum finds no shortage of compelling actors in the historical record: the spy dubbed “In-Law” who brought news, almost universally ignored, to the Israelis of a secret Egyptian plan to launch a coordinated attack, with Syria, during the high holy days and fulfill Anwar Sadat’s longstanding ambition to drive the Jews into the sea; the gallant Israeli armor commander who had served as a poster child, in 1967, for “a new generation of Jewish soldiers . . . who were brave, robust, and perhaps even invincible,” called on that fateful October to fight against overwhelming odds; even the beleaguered Egyptian chief of staff, who warned Sadat that the mission was doomed to fail. The surprises that Blum turns up in this swift-moving history of the lightning-quick Yom Kippur War are many: a purloined document from the Egyptian leadership to the Soviet general staff pleading for Scud missiles; dissent among the leaders of supposedly allied Arab states that proved “Arab unity, despite all the resolute public pronouncements, was an illusion”; Israel’s willingness to use nuclear weapons in the event that Arab armies arrived at the pre-1967 borders (“If they push us into the sea, they will find out they have nothing to return to,” one Israeli scientist tells Moshe Dayan. “Cairo, Damascus—poof! Gone!”); and the role the Yom Kippur War played in bringing Egypt and Israel to Camp David four years later.
A fine exercise in popular history, in time for the 30th anniversary of the conflict.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-001399-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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