An evenhanded view of a most partisan conflict.
From Enderlin, the Middle East bureau chief for France 2, a journalistic account of the current era of troubles in Israel and Palestine.
In the author’s view, the seating of Ariel Sharon’s government in February 2001 signaled the end of the Camp David era of negotiation with the Palestinian government of Yasir Arafat, undoing years of effort on the part of the Clinton administration. Sharon declared that Arafat was an unfit partner for peace. Although most Israelis agreed that a joint venture with the Palestinians was essential, most also accepted that Arafat was an enemy arguing for the destruction of Israel; worse enemies notwithstanding, he became “Arafat the terrorist” once more. In response to the growing intifada, Israel put new procedures in place. “The military police no longer immediately investigated the circumstances of a civilian death,” Enderlin charges, freeing troops to “react more spontaneously” in the field. That spontaneity, the journalist calculates, led to a lopsided body count: During the next five years, some 3,185 Palestinian civilians died in confrontations with the Israeli Defense Force, “among whom were hundreds of bystanders.” This confrontation was inevitable, argued Israel and its allies in the American government—most notably, in Enderlin’s view, neoconservative theoretician Richard Perle, then chair of Bush’s Defense Policy Board. It was inevitable, the author agrees, to the extent that all other possibilities but confrontation were systematically eliminated, freezing out Arafat (who bitterly complained, “Am I bin Laden?”) and fueling a vicious circle of rising radicalism and intransigence. Rejecting warnings by Bush administration moderates such as Colin Powell, the Sharon government finally decided it must either expel Arafat from Palestine or kill him. When he died of cancer in 2004, however, the cycle of violence continued, climaxing with the disastrous Lebanon invasion of 2006. Enderlin urges Israel to negotiate with the new government of Mahmoud Abbas based on the principle of “territory for peace”—without which, he reasonably concludes, peace will be impossible.
An evenhanded view of a most partisan conflict.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59051-171-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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