The tale of Aramco—a joint venture owned by Standard Oil of California, Exxon, Texaco, and Mobil in profitable symbiosis with Saudi potentates—and its eventual life as an Arabian entity is one to rival many an adventure novel. Brown (Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century, 1994) has produced a text populated with Islamic fundamentalists and their blue-eyed infidel friends who developed and exploited, from beneath the desert sands, the world’s greatest hydrocarbon reserves. Aramco, an integral piece of the Middle East jigsaw puzzle for two generations, was a colossal consortium continuously siphoning fabulous cash flows from what Brown calls “the Empty Quarter of Araby.” Aramco existed at the whim of Ibn Saud and the kings who followed him. Sometimes the relationship was difficult, but during WWII oil still flowed. And during the Cold War, Aramco was excused from federal investigation of profiteering. Extra profits also came at the expense of the firm’s hosts; oil was sold, for example, to Aramco’s affiliates to keep royalties down. Naturally, the firm regularly attempted to influence the American government to reduce support for Israel. When it came to pitting fixed public policy against petrodollars, who would blame Aramco for choosing the latter? The author doesn’t (though he notes the general failure to “persuade the Washington polity that U.S. Middle East policy endangered the Aramco concession”). Aramco, with its American owners, finally “became the instrument of a foreign power, Saudi Arabia,” Brown concedes. His business narrative is marked by tales of bribery, deceit, and intrigue. Withal, life as an “Aramcon,” as a Westerner in the corporate desert village, was privileged while it lasted. Finally, the Saudis took control and the idyll was over. After producing “a trillion or two” Aramco was “now at one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Here’s Big Oil geopolitics paired with high drama, adventure, and bloodshed, with kidnapping, murder, and Holy War. An interesting story, indeed.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-59220-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
