by Eugene Rogan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region.
Rogan (Modern History of the Middle East/St. Antony’s Coll., Oxford Univ.; The Arabs: A History, 2009, etc.) corrects Western assumptions about the “sick man of Europe.”
In this well-researched, evenhanded treatment of the Ottomans’ role in World War I, especially in its assessment of the Armenian genocide of 1918, the author delineates the urgent internal and external causes spurring the crumbling Turkish empire to seek a defensive alliance with Germany and counter Britain, France and Russia when war broke out in 1914. The coalition of fiery Young Turks had risen against the aging autocratic sultan and demanded a restoration of the constitution in 1908, but during the tumult, they allowed Turkey’s European neighbors to annex more territory. Russia’s territorial ambitions were most feared, while Britain and France could not be trusted. The war became a “global call to arms” for all parties, with the Ottomans declaring a jihad in order to unite Muslims. Rogan walks through the “opening salvos” of the war, at Basra, Aden and Egypt, showing the vulnerability of the Ottoman defenses; yet the Ottomans showed enormous spirit and ingenuity against the Entente assault on the Dardanelles in February 1915. Rogan elucidates the Allied debacle at Gallipoli—although the lack of maps is frustrating—a reckless campaign he blames more on Lord Kitchener than on Winston Churchill and which provoked a government crisis back in Britain. The dire campaigns in Mesopotamia, Suez and Palestine were not a “sideshow” to be dismissed by the Allied planners in their hopes for a quick victory over a weak Ottoman Empire. Actually, they produced—through the Arab Revolt galvanized by T.E. Lawrence and the drafting of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration—an uneasy armistice and partition that promised to be deeply divisive for another century.
An illuminating work that offers new understanding to the troubled history of this key geopolitical region.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02307-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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