An elegant examination of how the rules of justice have changed since 9/11.
Well-wrought investigative report about six young Arab-Americans from western New York who stumbled into terrorism.
NPR correspondent Temple-Raston (Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes, and a Nation’s Quest for Redemption, 2005, etc.) delves deeply into the lives of these residents of Lackawanna, a former steel-mill town near Buffalo populated largely by Yemenis. First arriving in the 1950s, the immigrants were noted for their ability to withstand the heat of the steel furnaces. By the early 1960s, Lackawanna had the second-largest Yemeni community (after Detroit) in the United States. But with the closing of the mills in the ’70s, the town began to suffer the effects of urban blight, and its disaffected youth found American ways more compelling than Arab tradition. Following the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, a swashbuckler named Kamel Derwish came to town, bragging about his brave exploits in Bosnia. He galvanized a group of youth from the Lackawanna mosque who met regularly to discuss Islam. Susceptible to Derwish’s subtle exhortations to become more committed Muslims, they read revolutionary tomes, trekked to Pakistan to study at a madrasa, then found themselves reluctant recruits at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in the spring of 2001, just months before “something big” was to occur. The camps were rough, and soon the Americans balked and wanted to return. After 9/11, the local FBI, which had been listening to phone calls and spying on the Lackawanna “terrorist cell,” went after the men, now terrified and in hiding, and charged them with sedition. Were they guilty, or simply alienated youth? Temple-Raston does a fair, impartial job of laying out the essential civil-rights issues here.
An elegant examination of how the rules of justice have changed since 9/11.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58648-403-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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