Students of geopolitics and current affairs would do well to spend time with this book, which, though deceptively slender,...
A journey across the ideological and literal battlegrounds of the Old World, featuring reports full of dire portent.
A specter is haunting Europe: anti-Semitism, nationalism, and all the other tired, old -isms that threaten to crush the ideals of the Enlightenment. In France, a rising right wing threatens to undo continental unity; in Greece, a rising left wing threatens to do the same, adding Grexit and perhaps Frexit to Brexit. Then there are the former Soviet satellites of the East, beset by internal problems and now menaced by a revanchist Russia, acting out with special vehemence in Ukraine. On that note, Foreign Policy Initiative fellow Kirchick observes that during the recent presidential election, there was “an overlap in the aggressive, lewd, trollish Twitter accounts supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and those pushing a pro-Kremlin message.” Then there is Hungary, whose rightist government seemingly wishes to recapitulate the glory days of Miklós Horthy; while the neo-Nazi fringe captures the most attention, “the more insidious menace comes from those wearing a cloak of respectability and who actually hold power.” So it ever was, and so Kirchick, traveling from one hot spot to the next, returns to an overarching and ancient threat. “The sad fact is that, in Europe today, there’s only one group of people who are regularly killed on the basis of their identity,” he writes, adding that when Muslim militants strike there are immediately calls from “right-thinking Europeans” to shun Islamophobia, while there are seldom calls of unity with Europe’s Jews when they are the victims—as they disproportionally are. There is little to cheer in the book, for the author writes that a refragmented Europe, diminished on the world stage if not outright collapsed, “means a more dangerous international state of affairs,” where the tiniest spark could lead to conflagration.
Students of geopolitics and current affairs would do well to spend time with this book, which, though deceptively slender, contains multitudes.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-21831-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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