Enlisting significant Arab-language scholarship, Kennedy provides a carefully calibrated, timely chronicle for nonacademic...
A mostly nonpolemical survey of the history of caliphates since the death of Muhammad in 632.
British scholar Kennedy (Arabic/SOAS, Univ. of London; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, 2007, etc.) concisely defines the caliphate as it has evolved through the ages from one Islamic court to the next, including the Ottoman ascendancy as protector of the Muslim people and today’s Islamic State group, which “looks back to caliphal examples and a romantic view of early Islamic warfare.” The title of “caliph” was essentially a spiritual designation, either as a “deputy” for Muhammad or for Allah himself; over the centuries, there has been considerable tension regarding the role. The first four caliphs after Muhammad’s death were considered Orthodox: the leader (always a man) should come from the powerful merchant tribe the Quraysh, the prophet’s own extended clan. However, should the successor be Muhammad’s close associate Abu Bakr or a hereditary successor, his cousin and son-in-law, Ali? The reign of Ali (Shiite), especially, would be identified with “the interests of the deprived and excluded in Muslim society, those who felt that their rights had been ignored or trampled on by dominant elites” (Sunnis). From the founding four, Kennedy delves chapter by chapter into the successful rule of, among others, the Umayyads, who helped to spread the Arabic language and wondrous architecture; the cultured Abbasids, who held together a multicultural Muslim world that lasted until the defeat by the Mongols in 1258; and the splinter Shiite caliphs—e.g., the Fatimids in Tunisia and Egypt. In the last chapter, the author touches on the misappropriations of the current caliphate established by the Islamic State group in 2014.
Enlisting significant Arab-language scholarship, Kennedy provides a carefully calibrated, timely chronicle for nonacademic readers.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09438-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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