Impressive reportage, a fearless commitment to seeing what there is to see, and a strong sense of history: a fine work of...
A travel writer’s anabasis through a country that is no country.
The Kurds, writes Bird (Neither East Nor West, 2001, etc.), are “an often-overlooked society that has been rocked and at times devastated by some of the most catastrophic events and tragic political policies of the last eighty years.” The fourth-largest ethnic group in the whole of the Middle East, they inhabit a huge swath of territory, stretching “through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of the former Soviet Union,” and they are numerous, with between 25 and 30 million in that region and another million in Europe and North America. Thus, Bird notes, they are the world’s most populous stateless ethnic group. History has not been kind to the Kurds; in recent years, thanks in part to the fact that Kurdistan takes in some significant deposits of oil, their country has been the object of contest and conquest among many powers. Bird relates a typical incident: the Shah of Iran had been arming the Kurds in their ongoing struggles in neighboring Iraq; yet, following a favorable accord with Iraq brokered by none other than Henry Kissinger, the Shah abandoned the Kurds, thousands of whom were subsequently slaughtered by Iraqi forces. “America is too great a power to betray a small power like the Kurds,” the Kurdish leader lamented; yet, as Bird notes, the US has betrayed the Kurds time and again, and so has England, and so have other major powers. Strangely, though, the Kurds still seem more or less favorably disposed toward the West, affording Bird safe passage throughout difficult country, where she sympathetically reports on daily life—much of it tough, to be sure, but with some surprising wrinkles (the Dohuk Kurds’ devotion to high fashion, for instance) that, in Bird’s hands, do much to humanize people who, for most Westerners, have hitherto served as an exotic symbol of endurance.
Impressive reportage, a fearless commitment to seeing what there is to see, and a strong sense of history: a fine work of literary travel, one that honors its subjects.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46892-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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