A ringing condemnation of “Wahhabi obscurantism and its totalitarian state” that is sure to cause controversy—and perhaps...
A provocative entry on Islam, from Schwartz (From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind, 1998), who lays blame on the Saudi regime for the attacks of 9/11.
The main lines of Schwartz’s charge are these: the governing ideology of the House of Sa’ud, the Wahhabi strain of Islam, is grounded in xenophobia, intolerance, and belief in lethal varieties of jihad; exported once at swordpoint to other parts of the Muslim world, this ideology has yielded untold misery for centuries; today, exported “from Pakistan and India to the Balkans, the Philippines, Western Europe, and America itself” at a cost of billions of petrodollars to the Saudi ruling elite, Wahhabism is the principal source of Islamic terror; and by propping up the Saudi royal family to keep Saudi oil flowing westward, the US is doing itself and the rest of the world no favors, but instead ought to be stirring up domestic revolution in the streets of Medina and Riyadh. Schwartz traces the us-against-them Wahhabist stance to the inhospitable environment of the Saudi interior, “a hotbed for early factionalists in Islam, particularly the Khawarij, known for their extreme pietism while preparing rebellion and mass murder.” The interior peoples eventually grew in power, and their ways became the norm for all Saudi society—and for militant Islamic groups worldwide. Though historians may take issue with some of its oversimplifications, Schwartz’s analysis is more sophisticated than much of the media punditry since September 11, and certainly more sympathetic to in-the-street Islam, for which, he says, the Saudi royal family and its allies, including Osama bin Laden, have no regard: “In the highly stratified Arab and Muslim nations, the street counts for nothing, which is the main reason people often crowd it yelling hateful slogans.”
A ringing condemnation of “Wahhabi obscurantism and its totalitarian state” that is sure to cause controversy—and perhaps inspire a few contingency plans in the Pentagon.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50692-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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