Of much interest to students of the Middle East, and of the psychology of cults.
Of suicide as a way of life: a study of the culture of violence surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
When the intifada began in 1988, independent scholars Oliver and Steinberg moved to Gaza and lived with a Palestinian family to study the situation. “We gladly talked to anyone who would talk with us—nationalists and Islamists, leaders and followers, stone throwers and spokesmen, militants and bystanders,” they write. Over the next years, some of those people talked with them reluctantly, while others were quite proud to speak openly of how they would “cut off the head of a Jew or a collaborator.” Oliver and Steinberg are sympathetic to the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians, including the suicide bombers they take pains to humanize even while showing them to be automata trained by murderous masters. In a memorable sequence, Oliver and Steinberg recall the Hamas (“zeal”) movement’s spiritual leader: Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the author of much of the rhetoric of Palestinian terrorism, who, “renowned for his asceticism, would in later years be seen driving around the camps of Gaza in a specially outfitted brown Range Rover, which some said was a gift from the Saudis, while others insisted it was from none other than Arafat.” Image is everything, of course, and the authors work with a large collection of photographs and videotapes depicting such things as a knife-wielding giant hand stabbing an Israeli soldier “like a machine gone mad” and mobs of young children waving copies of the Quran while lionizing fallen participants in “martyrdom operations”—not all of whom seem to have believed that they would really earn martyrdom in the bargain. The authors also look closely at the rhetoric of the suicide bombers and their coaches—for in such things as taking one’s own life in the service of a cause, one Hamas leader tells us, “the importance of ‘spurring on’ cannot be underestimated.”
Of much interest to students of the Middle East, and of the psychology of cults.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-511600-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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