Nicely written, accessible history, rich in detail and most timely.
A lively study of the Abbasid caliphate, the greatest power in the Islamic world for 200 years.
A century after Muhammad’s death, the Middle East was largely controlled by the Ummayad dynasty, which was not descended from the founder of Islam. Relatives of Muhammad resented that fact, reasoning that if they “could restore the rule of the Family of the Prophet, inequity and evil would be banished for ever.” It didn’t work out so neatly, writes Kennedy (History/Univ. of St. Andrews), for some of the Abbasids, who overthrew the Ummayads, had their share of problems—and, as Kennedy gamely promises, no small interest in “booze and sex.” The tone-setting second caliph, Mansur, was conventionally pious; he was best known for being tight with a dirham, driving contractors to distraction with his mania for cutting costs while building his magnificent capital at Baghdad. (Arab history knows him as “Abu’l-dawaniq, the father of pennies, because he counted them all.”) Yet Mansur was also “a political operator of genius” who had a knack for playing enemies off one another and for surviving intrigue; though not as monstrous as other regimes, his caliphate had plenty of blood on its hands. The fourth caliph, Harun al-Rashid, quite a political creature himself, made Baghdad a capital of an early golden age rightly celebrated in the Arabian Nights; yet on his death the country was plunged into civil war, rent by divisions that would take a more thoroughgoing sort of dictator to control. Saddam Hussein, it seems, learned a few lessons from his Abbasid predecessors, particularly Mutawwakil, “a prodigious builder of palaces” who constructed a string of expensive properties up and down the Tigris and Euphrates. His glory was short-lived; Mutawwakil was assassinated, and the caliphate that Mansur had painstakingly built collapsed. That event, Kennedy notes, marked “the demise of the unity of the Muslim world under a single sovereign” and the last time a major empire centered on Iraq.
Nicely written, accessible history, rich in detail and most timely.Pub Date: June 30, 2005
ISBN: 0-306-81435-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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