Recommended for students of current events in the Middle East.
As much as any opposition from what is supposed to be a shared enemy, a gang war strangles Palestinian aspirations for an independent state.
So writes former U.S. Treasury Department counterterrorism specialist Schanzer (Al-Qaeda’s Armies: Middle East Affiliate Groups & The Next Generation of Terror, 2004), asserting that “the factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah has overshadowed the very voice of the Palestinian people.” Fatah, the armed vanguard of the Palestine Liberation Organization, dates to the 1950s and was strongly identified with former leader Yasir Arafat, so much so that when Arafat died the organization fell into instant disarray. Its chief political rival since the late ’80s has been Hamas, an Islamist group that, Schanzer writes, has strong ties to both Saudi Arabia and al-Qaeda (“the jihadist ideologies of the two groups, founded within a year of one another, have the same roots”). Fatah was not shy of violence, though its chief means were at least paramilitary. Hamas has favored raining shells and bullets on Israeli civilians and made a specialty of the car bombs, suicide bombs and IEDs that have become common in the Middle East. With the one controlling Gaza and the other the West Bank, no Palestinian unity has been possible since Arafat’s death. Schanzer suggests that the United States and Israel have been largely correct in not negotiating directly with Hamas—though that position has become less tenable with the “surprising electoral victory” of Hamas in February 2006, when it took control of the Palestinian Authority. In the aftermath, sanctions against the PA have been fruitless, since Iran, by the author’s reckoning, has provided at least $120 million in aid in the meantime. Schanzer might have done more to address the suggestion, advanced in other scholarly sources, that Hamas was encouraged early on by the Israeli state precisely as a foil for Fatah, which would seem a divide-and-conquer ploy that backfired. Nonetheless, this well-argued account helps sort out the two groups’ tangled history of nationalism and terrorism, the latter of which Hamas refuses to give up.
Recommended for students of current events in the Middle East.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60905-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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