There’s no thesis as such here, only voices of more or less ordinary people who have much to say about the conduct of an...
“Those who are not with us are against us.” The words are familiar—but, writes French journalist Nivat, before they formed George W. Bush’s slogan, they belonged to the Communist rulers of Afghanistan.
The Communists were the enemy of the common people, according to many of the Afghans Nivat interviews in these pages. So, too, were the Taliban. So, too, are the American invaders, as they are in Iraq. Nivat opens in Iraqi Kurdistan, victim of an aggressive program of “Arabization” on the part of the Hussein regime, where the arrival of American liberators seems to have done little to improve the lot of ordinary people; says one bookish Kurd, “Arabs and Iraqi Kurds are waiting for Godot. . . . But Godot won’t come because Godot doesn’t exist, and the United States is not Godot.” Remarks a Turkoman of Kirkuk, “We’re grateful that they rid us of Saddam Hussein’s regime, even though everyone knows they hadn’t had weapons of mass destruction in ages, but now we don’t want anything more from them!” And an Arab policeman in Baghdad remarks of the Americans, “They’re extremely fussy and give orders we don’t understand, either literally or figuratively.” In other words, the invasion worked to unite previously disparate ethnic and religious groups in opposition. So it is that a Baathist soldier tucks his uniform into a closet and awaits the day when he might put it on again, another—a former bodyguard of Saddam’s slain son Uday—“lives very discreetly, always resisting the temptation to contact his former companions,” though the odds are good that he’s now part of the resistance. Nivat travels to Afghanistan to find much the same resentment over the American occupiers, whose accommodation to putatively “moderate” elements of the Taliban contradicts all the official rhetoric about ferreting out the bin Ladens of the world.
There’s no thesis as such here, only voices of more or less ordinary people who have much to say about the conduct of an unwanted war.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-0240-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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