The making of modern Iraq is just one small slice in this monumental, well-told story.
In an engaging history of the enormous contributions of the “land between two rivers,” Robertson (Ancient and Middle Eastern Studies/Central Michigan Univ.) is an energetic, positive booster for a remarkable people who have suffered through countless outsider incursions, especially in recent decades.
Focusing on the accomplishments of Mesopotamia and the ingenuity of its people through the ages, the author helps dispel myths and stereotypes about Iraq. Mesopotamia’s “seminal advances in human endeavor” began due to the region’s key central location between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, whose cyclical flooding spurred the use of irrigation by enterprising farmers, allowing the growth of grain and the development of woolen textiles for trade. The rivers facilitated important trade routes both east and west but also rendered the region vulnerable to external forces. From this “heartland of cities” rose the first writing system, cuneiform, and a bureaucratic system, celebrated by the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon. Robertson astutely notes how relatively little we know about the great Assyrian kingdom compared to ancient Rome, though some of the rulers are mentioned in the Old Testament. The vast, sophisticated city of Babylon became the capital of the Middle Eastern empire inherited by the Chaldeans, and despite its luxurious reputation, it was in Babylonian exile that the Hebrew priests, scribes, and scholars assembled the Old Testament. Overrun successively by Persians, Alexander the Great, Arab Muslims, Turks, and Mongols, Iraq was a “cradle” of world religions, from Zoroastrianism to Christianity. Robertson does a fine job delineating the brilliance of the Islamic golden age, centered at its new Abbasid capital of Baghdad, established in 762. The author also painstakingly explains the differences and rivalries among the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.
The making of modern Iraq is just one small slice in this monumental, well-told story.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-85168-586-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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 Yorkerstaff 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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