by James Barr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2012
A carefully constructed chronicle of a shameful imperialist carve-up.
A British historian methodically traces the pernicious ramifications of the French-British rivalry in Syria and Lebanon after World War I.
Barr (Setting the Desert on Fire: T. E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918, 2008) carefully places the fragments of the Middle East puzzle together after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, from the divisive, arbitrary British-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to the Zionists’ use of terrorism to oust the British and establish the state of Israel in 1948. Reluctant allies against the Germans, the British and French had to divide the Ottoman spoils, and the agreement essentially “drew a line in the sand” from Acre to Kirkuk, the north falling under French protection and the south to the British. Both sides ignored the incipient rise of Arab nationalism, except when Sharif Hussein’s revolt of June 1916 promised the British a way of undermining French influence in the region, with T.E. Lawrence being a convenient tool of organizing the Arabs. Meanwhile, the British were quietly promising the Zionists a homeland in Palestine as a way of courting the Americans. Britain’s need for oil prompted a tidy exchange with the French: oil-rich Mosul and Jerusalem for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. Self-determination vaguely promised to the Arabs by the victorious powers at the close of WWI would only arrive after revolt against both British and French rulers, all while the Jewish emigration aroused the ire of the Palestinian Arabs. Barr sure-footedly wades through this political morass, noting some startling developments, such as Charles de Gaulle and the Free French’s brazen tenacity in holding on to Syria and Lebanon, and French assistance in arming the Zionist terrorists against the British.
A carefully constructed chronicle of a shameful imperialist carve-up.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07065-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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