An intriguing, enlightening, often disheartening but occasionally hopeful tour of the Middle East, focusing on militant Islam. Veteran New York Times correspondent Judith Miller (One by One: Facing the Holocaust, 1990) has been reporting from the Middle East for more than two decades, writing about Islam's rush to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of secular Arab nationalism. She profiles ten countries, from Algeria in the west to Iran in the east, attempting to explain historically and politically how each country arrived at its often perilous and sometimes tragic present. There is much to be depressed about in Miller's book: Sudan, truly hell on earth; Egypt, falling back on brutality to suppress Islamic militancy when it fumbled more reasonable alternatives; Algeria, where the religious and secular are in open war. In virtually every country, there is some form of violent Islamic militancy at work, and governments have tried with varying success to either coopt or repress the movement. Miller, critical of violations of civil and human rights, concedes that Syria's President Hafez al-Assad has dealt with the militants more effectively than anyone else, by terrifying away their potential followers with his 1982 massacre of thousands of people in the town of Hama following an uprising. But Miller also argues that militant Islam is far less homogeneous than commonly depicted, and could yet evolve toward a more pragmatic, less absolutist philosophy. Ironically, Miller sees reason for hope in Iran, ruled by Islamic militants since 1979. She finds there a lively and surprisingly open debate about whether religious leaders are necessarily the people best suited ``to build a car or stabilize a monetary system.'' Miller's writing is rich and detailed, and her vivid profiles of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi and Jordan's King Hussein are themselves worth the price of the book. A nuanced examination of Islamic militancy, crammed with information, that puts this growing movement and its most horrible terrorist manifestations into invaluable context.
Pub Date: May 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80973-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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
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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