A fine new account of an unnecessary crisis that "scattered dragon's teeth on all-too-fertile soil,” which “would bear...
A tale of political bungling with tragic consequences on two continents.
Following the nationalization of the Suez Canal by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in July 1956, the governments of Great Britain, France, and Israel entered into a scheme for a joint invasion of Egypt. Each nation's leader had his own motivations, including control of the canal and oil pipelines, Nasser's support for Algerian rebels, Israeli access to the Red Sea, and a strong dislike of Nasser personally. Attempts to keep their collusion secret quickly led them into a tangle of lies to their allies—in particular the United States—to the United Nations, and sometimes to their own governments. The resulting invasion in October and November was a colossal diplomatic, political, and military fiasco resolved when an infuriated Dwight Eisenhower forced a British withdrawal by withholding support for the plummeting pound. This neo-colonialist folly further rendered Western governments incapable of confronting the Soviet Union when it crushed the Hungarian uprising that, by coincidence, occurred during the Suez crisis. For Eisenhower, who faced an election in early November, Suez was the mother of all October surprises. Guardian columnist von Tunzelmann's (Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean, 2011, etc.) narrative cracks along like an international political thriller as she tracks the action day by day, sometimes hour by hour. The British prime minister, Anthony Eden, leads the cast of characters; unhealthily obsessed with Nasser, his quixotic effort to reassert British dominance in the Middle East effectively ended Britain's status as a great power. The author lays bare at every turn the arrogance, complacency, incompetence, and wishful thinking that drove British and French decisions in a story that could appear as comedy were it not for the death, destruction, and diplomatic wreckage that resulted.
A fine new account of an unnecessary crisis that "scattered dragon's teeth on all-too-fertile soil,” which “would bear gruesome fruit for decades.”Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-224924-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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 Yorkerstaff 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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