Bitter lessons from the past unearthed and expertly reexamined.
An impassioned argument that the Arabs of Greater Syria who fought for the Allies in World War I, deeply committed to the Wilsonian notion of self-determination, were robbed of their chance at democracy.
Thompson, the Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace at American University, claims that this tragic story of Syria’s occupation by England and France—and their deliberate effort to “destroy the Syrian Arab state” just as it was forming its democratic constitution—has “never before been told in English.” She notes that only four books have covered the Syrian Arab Congress and its drafting of a “147-article constitution modeled on its Ottoman predecessor with modifications inspired by American federalism and checks and balances”—a document created within the slim window between the declaration of Syrian independence and the imperial partition of Syria as agreed upon at the San Remo Conference in April 1920. Beginning in 1916, Prince Faisal, the championed leader of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire who was famously advised by T.E. Lawrence, defied his father in advocating for Syrian independence. Yet with Woodrow Wilson incapacitated by stroke, English and French leaders, using the League of Nations system of mandates as pretext, declared Faisal’s government illegal. The author clearly demonstrates how they planned the occupation and partition just as a remarkable coalition of liberals and religious leaders agreed on a system protecting minorities to “balance freedom and rule of law.” In a book sure to interest students of Middle Eastern history, particularly in the 20th century, Thompson fashions an original, authoritative study, laying out the process of the “theft” of Syrian democracy. “The history of postwar Syria,” she writes, “reveals that the tragedy of the 1919 [Paris Peace] conference was due not to the oversight of a few exhausted and old-fashioned statesmen, but rather to their vigorous effort to expand a colonial and racialist world system.”
Bitter lessons from the past unearthed and expertly reexamined.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4820-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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