Caldwell’s analysis is calm and forceful, and it provides excellent background for a much-needed discussion.
A specter is haunting Europe, writes Weekly Standard senior editor and Financial Times columnist Caldwell—a theocracy about to overwhelm a tolerant, relativistic society.
The revolution referenced in the title is sometimes so quiet as to be unnoticed—if one is not living in Germany, England, Spain or France. Those countries are being transformed by increasing numbers of Muslims radicalized to despise the very democracies into which they have immigrated—or, increasingly, have been born. “Scale matters,” writes Caldwell. If the United States had proportionate numbers to France, “it would have close to 40 million Muslims, concentrated in a handful of major cities and poised to take political control of them.” The author’s tone is not alarmist, but it is urgent, and the question of political control lies at the heart of his argument. What happens to Europe if its institutions are dismantled by those who believe in an authority other than the will of the people? Caldwell gives specific weight to the view that Islam in its current iterations is hostile to assimilation and instead bent on overwhelming other ways of thought. “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines,” he concludes, “generally the former…changes to suit the latter.” The author examines Western responses to the demographic and ideological shift, none of them completely adequate—though Nicholas Sarkozy’s idea that Muslims doff the veil when entering secular society just as he removes his shoes on entering a mosque is a start.
Caldwell’s analysis is calm and forceful, and it provides excellent background for a much-needed discussion.Pub Date: July 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-51826-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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