Useful reading for students of contemporary geopolitics, in which Iran has proven a constant, often destabilizing presence.
Scholarly portrait of a nation that resists easy categorization—and containment.
Less than a year ago, writes Saikal (Political Science, Arab and Islamic Studies/Australian National Univ.; Weak States, Strong Societies: Power and Authority in the New World Order, 2016, etc.), a wave of popular protests swept across Iran, “calling for an end to theocratic rule and costly involvement in regional conflicts,” among other demands. Because the United States immediately jumped in to denounce the government of the country’s moderate—compared to past leaders, at least—president, Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian leadership convincingly charged that the protests were orchestrated from abroad and did not represent the will of the Iranian people. As a result, the theocracy imposed 40 years ago by the Ayatollah Khomeini lives on in a different guise. In studying the contemporary Iranian regime, Saikal observes that American efforts to contain Iran as a regional power have been met with blowback, not least the effect of pushing Iran ever closer to Russia, relations with which “have expanded to include a strong geostrategic dimension,” which is especially pronounced in Syria today. That nation is a point for the projection of power for both nations—and uncomfortably close to areas where American interest is strong. As the author shows, not all is well within Iran’s borders. Its uneven economic development, despite oil wealth, has been the result of numerous missteps in the last four decades, not least a savage war with Iraq that cost Iran at least 500,000 young people who could have contributed to the economy. It did not help when the Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power and mismanaged the nuclear issue, which brought substantial Western economic sanctions. Saikal notes that Iran’s future is uncertain for internal reasons, some economic and some political, including the lack of a clear plan of succession for the current government, and the Trump administration’s “gunboat diplomacy," which only raises the odds of war.
Useful reading for students of contemporary geopolitics, in which Iran has proven a constant, often destabilizing presence.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-691-17547-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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