A revelatory, impressive debut.
How America’s unappeasable thirst for cheap oil led to foreign-policy bungling in the Persian Gulf.
In his first book, Cooper revisits a not-so-distant period when the United States was the world’s No. 1 oil producer and Iran its foremost ally in the Middle East. He traces the dizzying spiral that, from 1969 to 1977, left America the world’s biggest oil importer, at sword’s point with Iran and huddled up with and reliant upon Saudi Arabia. Relying on a rich cache of previously classified notes, transcripts, cables, policy briefs and memoranda, Cooper explains how oil drove, even corrupted, American foreign policy during a time when Cold War imperatives still applied. With American influence and power curbed by Vietnam and later Watergate, with the industrial West at the mercy of OPEC and with Iran and Saudi Arabia competing for regional primacy, successive administrations under severe domestic economic pressure maneuvered in the Middle East to insure the flow of cheap crude. The most compelling dimension to Cooper’s narrative is the story of U.S-Iran relations, particularly during the Nixon and Ford administrations. To Americans, the Shah was the Guardian of the Gulf, a modern ruler and a reliably anti-communist ally. Nixon ramped up arms sales and also loosened import quotas. With quiet U.S. approval, the Shah raised prices to pay for a huge, more than merely defensive arsenal. Then, with Iran’s economy at the mercy of falling oil prices, with Iranians chafing at the Shah’s iron rule, with the impatient and increasingly out of touch Shah dying of cancer, the Saudis, encouraged by the U.S. government, broke with OPEC, flooded the oil market and brought the Shah to his knees. The Ayatollah Khomeini waited offstage. No U.S. official emerges unscathed from Cooper’s analysis, but he judges Henry Kissinger especially harshly. Notoriously deficient in matters of oil and economics, Kissinger insisted on personalizing relations with the Shah, hoarding information, stifling critics and enhancing his own power, all at the expense of a genuine American understanding of the precariousness of the Shah’s throne.
A revelatory, impressive debut.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5517-2
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.
A delightful new translation of what is widely considered the first work of history and nonfiction.
Herodotus has a wonderful, gossipy style that makes reading these histories more fun than studying the rise of the Persian Empire and its clash with Greece—however, that’s exactly what readers will do in this engaging history, which is full of interesting digressions and asides. Holland (In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire, 2012, etc.), whose lifelong devotion to Herodotus, Thucydides and other classical writers is unquestionable, provides an engaging modern translation. As Holland writes, Herodotus’ “great work is many things—the first example of nonfiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history, the most important source of information we have for a vital episode in human affairs—but it is above all a treasure-trove of wonders.” Those just being introduced to the Father of History will agree with the translator’s note that this is “the greatest shaggy-dog story ever written.” Herodotus set out to explore the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars and to explore the inability of East and West to live together. This is as much a world geography and ethnic history as anything else, and Herodotus enumerates social, religious and cultural habits of the vast (known) world, right down to the three mummification options available to Egyptians. This ancient Greek historian could easily be called the father of humor, as well; he irreverently describes events, players and their countless harebrained schemes. Especially enjoyable are his descriptions of the Persians making significant decisions under the influence and then waiting to vote again when sober. The gifts Herodotus gave history are the importance of identifying multiple sources and examining differing views.
A feast for students of ancient history and budding historians of any period.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-02489-6
Page Count: 840
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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