A noted Middle Eastern author takes an intriguing historical, psychological, and literary trip through the political polemics that have marked much of life in the region for the last 25 years. MacArthur award recipient Ajami (Middle Eastern Studies/Johns Hopkins Univ.) takes the title of his book from T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But unlike that book, which was a portrait of the Arab culture from the outside looking in, Ajami's well-crafted tale is an insider's look at Arab angst. Born in Lebanon, Ajami (The Arab Predicament, not reviewed, etc.) has written a book that is at once a mini-history of the Middle East and a personal journey into the world postWW II Arabs such as himself have inherited. Ajami relies on the literature of the day as a guidepost for his journey, using various authors and poets to better understand his own life and the themes that continue to challenge his peers. He opens with a look at the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi, who killed himself in despair the day Israel came into Lebanon in 1982. Ajami examines as well the theocratic politics of the 1980s, an era that saw the rise of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran and was discussed in the writings of Adonis, Nizar Qabbani, Abdelrahman Munif, and Sadiq al-Azm. Ajami's analytical microscope also focuses on the era that closed with the Persian Gulf War of 199091. Egypt is analyzed through the assasination of Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, and the life of the revered novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who was persecuted by religious extremists. The book closes with a chapter on Israel and its relationship with the Arab intellectual class. For those seeking a better understanding of the whys and wherefores of modern Arab life, this book is a beautifully written, insightful overview.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40150-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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