A slow read—sometimes those 444 days seem to pass in real time—but full of thought-provoking insights on one of the world’s...
The first shot in the current war between Wahhabis and Westerners, suggests veteran political journalist Harris (Shooting the Moon, 2001, etc.), was fired in Teheran a quarter of a century ago.
Actually, writes Harris, there wasn’t much shooting when a swarm of revolutionary guards and students seized the US embassy in 1979: the attack came as a surprise, and the attackers were so numerous that they were able to swarm over their American adversaries. (The Marine guards also showed restraint, Harris might have added.) The authors of the plot to capture the US embassy had smaller ambitions than came to be played out. Twenty-two-year-old engineering student Ibrahim Asgarzadeh planned instead to seize the compound for two or three days and, rather like the SDS at Columbia, use the experience to secure a forum for their grievances against the US: “The object of their action was not revenge but illumination.” Hotter heads prevailed, and the rest is a history that Harris does a generally good job of capturing. He’s sharply critical of the last Shah of Iran, who spent his country’s money lavishly, yet also shows a few flickers of admiration for a man who seems to have known that he was playing an elaborate role; the shah’s downfall, he suggests, came as much from the rise of Jimmy Carter, who had small patience for Iran’s feared secret police and the shah’s excuses that “it was only communists he hunted,” as it did from homegrown restiveness and the rumblings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The seizure of the embassy rings strange echoes today; Harris notes that in October 2001 the Bush administration quashed a lawsuit by the surviving hostages against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a part of the supposed axis of evil, while even as the Iranian revolution ate its first generation of young, it continues to inspire anti-Western militants around the world.
A slow read—sometimes those 444 days seem to pass in real time—but full of thought-provoking insights on one of the world’s preeminent trouble zones.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-32394-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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