A solid overview of a nation much in world news and of economic trends that will have significant effects in the global...
Tracing the conjoined realms of dynastic politics and international commerce in the history of Saudi Arabia.
It was an Arab from the desert, Abdul Aziz, who led the struggle to unify the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula into the kingdom of al Saud, but what gave him the wherewithal to link the settlements of his new country were petrodollars, brought to the kingdom by an American concern called Aramco. Indeed, writes energy consultant and historian Wald, it was the vision of what the company built for its own workers—schools and hospitals and apartment blocks—that set Abdul Aziz on his modernizing path, which was undertaken with some reluctance since the king “felt more than a little uneasy at the pace at which his people’s traditional lifestyle was changing.” Later, the Saudi government would nationalize Aramco; in recent years, there have been proposals for a public offering, though whether for Saudi investors exclusively or a broader clientele remains to be seen. Wald shows how the al Saud rulers entered into another uneasy alliance—with religious fundamentalists—in order to legitimate and solidify their rule and spread it throughout Arabia. She rejects the thought that, despite the overwhelming Saudi presence among the 9/11 hijackers, the Saudi royals have much involvement with terrorism, which is bent on upsetting their power as much as waging jihad against the West. The author closes by hinting at reforms that she notes at the outset are beyond the scope of her discussion, reforms not just in the structure of Aramco and the company’s approach to energy, but also in the larger Saudi society, evidenced by such things as greater investment in education and a diversified economy in which women fully participate.
A solid overview of a nation much in world news and of economic trends that will have significant effects in the global marketplace in years to come.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-660-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
HISTORY | BUSINESS | WORLD | INVESTING | GENERAL BUSINESS | 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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