Amusing anecdotes and exotic backdrops keep readers engaged, but they do little to aid in understanding the complex society...
An entertainingly exhaustive, though imperfect, biography of an inscrutable monarch.
Few countries were changed as completely and irrevocably over the course of the 20th century as Saudi Arabia, and no leader shaped his country as thoroughly as did Ibn Saud (1876–1973). Husband to at least 20 women and father of “at least 45 sons and probably an even larger number of daughters”—a few of his sons have succeeded him as king—Ibn Saud began life as a Bedouin raider living in a tent and ended it as an all-powerful potentate worth billions of dollars, a transformation that resembles nothing so much as the history of his own homeland. Darlow and Bray (who died in 2010) collaborate on a comprehensive history of the only man in modern times to lend his name to a country, a rebranding that marked “the beginning of a shift from being a host of separate, often competing, tribes and regions into one coherent, centrally administered state.” The authors adroitly narrate the military and political maneuvers that consumed much of Ibn Saud’s attention, but the welter of detail they provide will overwhelm some readers. As Darlow and Bray chronicle the sprouting of skyscrapers and expressways in the shifting sands of one of the most traditionalist societies on earth—where even “the existence of barber shops and the practice of clapping” are controversial topics, and where women are famously treated as the property of their guardians—some of the more arcane minutia of the king’s life merely clouds the picture. Ultimately, readers may feel the book is both too long and too narrowly focused.
Amusing anecdotes and exotic backdrops keep readers engaged, but they do little to aid in understanding the complex society in which Ibn Saud lived.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-579-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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