Eight conversations between the author and Mohammad Reza—Shah of Iran until 1979— as well as a record of life in an Iranian prison under the Ayatollah's regime. On September 23, 1978, Naraghi, a prominent Iranian sociologist, met with the Shah in the Shah's summer palace in Tehran. Already a friend of Queen Farah through family connections, the author believed that he was called in because the Shah felt isolated and abandoned, confused by the discrepancies between official reports of Iranian problems and by the daily incidents in the street. In eight subsequent talks—which the sociologist dutifully recorded—the two discussed topics ranging from the origins of the revolutionary movement to an analysis of day-to-day events. But despite the Shah's apparent desire for information, he ``lacked a complete picture,'' Naraghi says, ``because he preferred to feed his own fantasies rather than mend his ways.'' Unfortunately, rather than offer a complete picture here of the dramatic ideological transition then going on in Iran, Naraghi emphasizes the self-aggrandizing details of the Shah's daily life, as well as the importance to the Shah of his counsel. After the revolution, Naraghi was imprisoned three times, spending 33 months behind bars. But here, too, the author concentrates on prisoners who were important politicians and intellectuals, as well as on wealthy ``economic detainees,'' many of whom asked him for advice. Naraghi was finally let free largely because of the efforts of one Rassouli, a driver who'd worked for him before the revolution. In a section called ``The Quiet Courage of Simple People,'' the author describes his surprise at his former driver's help: Even though Rassouli ardently supported the new Islamic state, he organized a petition for Naraghi's release, inspiring a tribunal to report back that ``Your man has been a victim of ill-intentioned machinations.'' Today, Naraghi lives in exile in Paris. A detailed but condescending and rather dull portrait, with few insights, of a problematic time in Iran's history.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1994
ISBN: 1-56663-033-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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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