A lively account of the diplomatic and military battles during the Arab-Israeli conflict’s first half-century; it’s the companion to a public-TV documentary entitled Israel and the Arabs. A major plus of this sound-bite history’s television origins is its access to some titillating exclusives. In transcripts of a taped conversation between Jordan’s King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, he warns her ten days before the 1973 war that Syria and Egypt are preparing to attack. An earlier scoop involves secret talks between Egypt and Israel in which Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser requests Israeli help in dealing with the Americans. Perhaps the best ratings grabber involves the dangerous, bloody days of Black September, 1970. Hussein is crushing the PLO state that Arafat has built in Amman. The authors put us in the Syrian backrooms, where Hafiz Assad (then merely minister of defense and air force commander) opposes an attack on Jordan, but hundreds of tanks are launched to save the PLO. The Soviets refuse to help the beleaguered Hussein. President Nixon, found in a bowling alley, agrees to allow the Israeli air force to turn the Syrians back. Meanwhile, President Numeiry of Sudan leaves an Arab summit in the Nile Hilton to fly to war-torn Amman and miraculously smuggle Arafat back to the conference. Upset about the survival and “abduction” of his enemy, Hussein bravely defends his interests at the Hilton. Libya’s Qaddafi “had suggested that the king should be shot,” but now only says Hussein should “go and have his head examined.” Such dialogue and detail (you can practically see the camera angles) enliven the book. It achieves an adequate political balance in the backgrounds of its two authors: Bregman is an Israeli with a doctorate in War Studies from King’s College, London; El-Tahri is a Lebanese-born, Egyptian-educated journalist. An enjoyable read, fired by dramatic and emotive prose, but too much a TV documentary to be confused with history. (photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1999
ISBN: 1-57500-057-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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