A valuable portrait of a society moving toward fulfilling “the promises of freedom and democracy” of the Arab Spring—but...
Former New York Times Cairo bureau chief Kirkpatrick delivers a sharply detailed firsthand look at Tahrir Square and its aftershocks.
As an opening parable in this morally charged chronicle of practical politics and the consequences of unaccountable centralized power, the author offers the example of the great Aswan Dam, built in the 1950s by President Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt for electricity, with many millions of American dollars behind it. The dam displaced 120,000 people, killed fish, silted the Nile, and led to “an explosion in waterborne diseases.” Yet Nasser’s government and the Western powers alike declared the dam a victory. So it was in 2011, when Egypt shook off one near dictatorship and replaced it with another only to have a military coup replace that strongman and further crack down on dissent. Such victory as there is to declare is hard to discern. Egypt is poor, overpopulated, and riddled with a corrupt bureaucracy, but apart from that, Kirkpatrick writes, it defies the usual characterizations. Israel and Egypt have cooperated, against all expectation, in fighting the Islamic State group; Egyptian women are perhaps more politically engaged than American women; Islamists willing to commit terror are in it for more than the promise of a harem in the afterlife; and so on. Pushing away layers of myth, the author depicts a complex, straining-to-be-modern society that is hampered by autocracy and has long been so. It has also been betrayed and seduced by it, as when Mohamed Morsi talked a game good enough that, by defying the generals, for liberals and leftists, he briefly “appeared to be, as he had promised, their president, too.” He was not, but it seems he was better than the military alternative—a lesson lost on the American government, Kirkpatrick writes, which pushed for democracy on one hand but for order on the other and in the end got neither.
A valuable portrait of a society moving toward fulfilling “the promises of freedom and democracy” of the Arab Spring—but with a way to go still.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2062-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
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
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