by David Kimche ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1992
An Israeli insider's insightful account of 44 years of deadly superpower intrigue, inevitable Arab-Israeli wars, and elusive attempts at peace. English-born Kimche (coauthor, The Sandstorm, 1968) has had a front-row seat to decades of Mideast drama that have unfolded while he has served in the Israeli prime minister's office, including a stint as director-general of the Foreign Ministry. While his revealing chapters on Israel's role in the Iran-contra affair might have sufficed for an eye-opening short book or a long essay, Kimche (largely to our benefit) recaps the entire lengthy background to the current peace process, now slouching from Madrid to be born. Major points here include: Brezhnev's primary role in setting up the Six-Day War; Sadat's masterful deception of both American and Israeli experts in 1973; Carter's bungling of the peace process, which forced Sadat to Jerusalem; the US and French sabotage of a Lebanese treaty with Israel in 1982; and major US intelligence failures, from the Shah of Iran's terminal cancer to the ``Kuwaiti Lorelei.'' Finally, Kimche—an impassioned believer in the merits of Israel making a separate peace with Palestinians in the administered territories—bitterly blames Arafat and the Arab rejectionists for obstructing opportunities for peace, particularly during the summer of 1967. A controversial mix of history and opinion that's both timely and noteworthy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-684-19422-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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