by Laura Secor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016
An insightful chronicle of bloody repression and brave defiance.
A close look at Iranian culture and politics from the 1979 revolution to the present.
Journalist Secor, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications, visited Iran five times between 2004 and 2012, interviewing more than 150 Iranians and observing four elections. Those experiences, and many published sources, inform her revealing, often shocking debut book about the turbulent nation perceived by the West as a monolithic threat. The 1979 uprising that ousted the shah “was supposed to yield a just and self-governing” nation; instead, the country fell into “war, want, and profound isolation.” Despite having an elected president and parliament, a cleric reigned as “vice-regent of God on earth” and commander of the army. All laws were subject to the approval of this Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Khomeini wielded that power with ferocity against liberals, leftists, and the United States. Nevertheless, some Iranian intellectuals questioned tradition, published widely read critiques, and looked to the West “for its most useful modern ideas while discarding its toxic core.” By the fall of 1998, many of these writers “understood that they were living under siege.” Within the next few years, writes Secor, “the Islamic Republic was riddled with mafia-like grids that operated in secrecy.” In June 2005, the country made a surprising choice for president: the little-known mayor of Tehran, arrogant, swaggering, with a scruffy beard and “goofy grin,” who campaigned as a populist: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a common man, and a demagogue.” In matters foreign and domestic, “he smashed things and watched indifferently as others picked up the pieces.” Despite all this, Secor feels optimistic about Iran’s future, claiming that the nation has a “seemingly endless capacity to produce internal opposition to its own authoritarianism.” She characterizes its current president, Hassan Rouhani, as a moderate who wants to foster goodwill toward the West.
An insightful chronicle of bloody repression and brave defiance.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59448-710-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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