Schneer (History/Georgia Tech Univ.; The Thames, 2005, etc.) examines the divide-and-conquer politics of the colonial powers as they were brought to bear on 20th-century Palestine.
On the surface, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was well intentioned. Named for its “odd protagonist,” British diplomat and government official A.J. Balfour (1848-1930), it afforded a sympathetic vehicle to Zionist aspirations for a homeland in the old Holy Land. In a time of widespread anti-Semitism, Balfour paid heed to Zionist pioneer Chaim Weizmann and his insistence that European Jews had contributed immeasurably to the ascendant cultures of Germany and France. Others within the British government were unenthusiastic at the prospect of a Jewish return to Palestine, with Lloyd George, by one fly-on-the-wall account, caring not a whit for the Jews in question but taking a strong view that without them, all of the Holy Land might “pass into the possession or under the protectorate of ‘Agnostic Atheist France.’!” French aspirations in Syria and Lebanon entered into the picture, as did the disposition of the doddering Ottoman Empire, which crumbled with Turkey's defeat in World War I. Schneer offers a portrait of events that are confusing at best, and that have many origins, whether in British designs to contain those French aspirations, to temper—and here his account is timely—the rising mood of jihad among Muslims living in British colonies, and to limit the growth of the Russian Empire to the north. To a large extent, the author writes, the Zionists and the Arabs whose land would be in play were unaware of those larger imperial games; “neither party,” he writes, “understood that they were in a race at all, and both parties incorrectly identified their adversary.” The result, which Schneer examines in an overworked metaphor, was the sowing of dragon's teeth that yield fierce monsters to this day. A complex-enough tale that the lengthy dramatis personae that opens the book is not a feature but a necessity.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6532-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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 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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