Lucid and solidly reported.
Well-framed journalistic portrait by the Washington Post’s former Cairo bureau chief of a strategically important nation in a time of terror and turmoil.
Murphy offers a view of contemporary Egypt that amplifies such recent studies of Islamism and regional unrest as John L. Esposito’s Unholy War (p. 542) and Anton La Guardia’s War Without End (p. 546). Religious terrorism, he writes, has its roots in three historical developments: the general resurgence of pietist, fundamentalist Islam, in part as a reaction to encroaching Western culture; the failure of the international community to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the rise and continued existence of authoritarian governments in a region long troubled by poverty, inequality, and corruption. As Murphy wisely points out, when “citizens feel that they have lost control of their lives, they take refuge in the familiar and fundamental.” The result has been hatred not just for the West, but also for the government of a country whose internal stability is a matter of extreme importance for the US, at least as long as the US remains dependent on oil imports. Murphy observes that tEgypt has been of two minds, or perhaps two faces, in the matter of Israel; though bound to peace accords, it has allowed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to serve as a distraction and safety valve to keep unrest away from its own doors, as all the while critics of Nasserite socialism and Egypt’s subsequent secular governments have urged that the Arab states are weak “because they had not built their nations on religion as the Zionist Jews had.” Murphy’s account depicts an Egypt uncomfortably close to collapse, though full of devout Muslims who have no interest in seeing their nation become another Iran or Afghanistan and are willing to struggle for the soul of Islam.
Lucid and solidly reported.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3578-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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