by Hamid Hadi ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2016
A colorful account of the rise of Islamic radicals in Afghanistan.
This first installment of a two-volume history tracks the ascent of Afghanistan as a hotbed for terrorism.
Beginning with the 1998 Taliban assault on the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, debut author Hadi explores the evolution of modern terrorism in Afghanistan. The book’s first half is dedicated to the Taliban, who represent the latest (and perhaps most troubling) in a long line of armed groups that have made peace impossible in the country, as well as a recap of the nation’s turbulent history of invasions. In the second half, Hadi launches into a sustained analysis of events since 1978, the year of the Soviet incursion and the beginning of Afghanistan’s ongoing period of nearly incessant conflict. The author breaks down the various players and phases of the long war up to the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud in September 2001, with particular attention paid to the way in which foreign powers tipped the scales for one faction or another. While the Taliban are excoriated for their many atrocities—Hadi hates the group even more than most people do—the author also identifies the actors who have helped create the instability in Afghanistan. He singles out the self-serving actions of the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as the terrorism-tolerant regimes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Hadi writes in a dense, breathless prose that sometimes veers into awkward or unpredictable directions. The reader quickly gets used to his habit of making unsubstantiated claims like “Historians agree that no other country of comparable size and population to Afghanistan has seen so much action in the course of history.” Hadi is clearly deeply versed in his country’s recent events, and his conclusions as to how it reached its present state of volatility reside well within the mainstream view. Even so, at no point does the reader feel that this is an objective historical account. Hadi has decided who the villains of this chronicle are, and he shows no interest in masking his disdain for them.
A colorful account of the rise of Islamic radicals in Afghanistan.Pub Date: March 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-0008-2
Page Count: 590
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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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