A fitting, clear-eyed send-off to an infamous dictator.
A nearly incredible, fantastical tale of the rise and fall of the “mad dog” of Libya.
By turns friend and foe of the West, champion and tormentor of his own people, over four decades, Muammar Gaddafi had plenty of help inside and out propagating one of the most arbitrarily brutal, oppressive regimes in the world. British journalist Hilsum followed the events of the Arab Spring closely for Britain’s Channel 4 News and others, and her work combines an on-the-ground eyewitness account and a nuanced history of how he managed to stay in power for so long. The locus of incendiary resentment that sparked the Libyan uprising centered on the notorious prison Abu Salim, where, on June 28, 1996, 1,270 prisoners were gunned down. Their bodies were never delivered to relatives, and their deaths were only acknowledged a decade later. With the spread of Arab discontent in February 2011, the Abu Salim families had had enough and took to the streets. Having seized power in a coup in 1969, Gaddafi gleaned the finer points of authoritarianism from his hero Gamal Nasser, the East German Stasi and the Chinese. Gaddafi embarked on a cultural revolution and so-called Green Terror to purge rivals, banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to his authority, organized public hangings and essentially abolished the private sector. Hilsum diligently works through Gaddafi's grandiose schemes and jumbled reign, during which he was the target of numerous assassination attempts. With great clarity, the author demonstrates not only the criminal megalomania of Gaddafi and his pernicious network of nepotism, but also the venality and hypocrisy of the West that kept him in power until the bitter end.
A fitting, clear-eyed send-off to an infamous dictator.Pub Date: June 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59420-506-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
