A well-argued, well-observed journey into a little-known area likely to be of much importance in days to come.
After tagging along with Daily Telegraph correspondent Kleveman on this vivid, well-narrated spin through the oil-rich Caspian region, anyone who believed that the recent American invasion of Iraq was about countering terrorism might want to reconsider.
That trumped-up war, Kleveman writes, was just one episode in the developing “New Great Game”—the old one being the 19th-century race between Russia and Great Britain for control of Central Asia—that is now playing out between East and West, and more pointedly among the three poles of a fundamentalist Islam, a protective Russia, and an energy-hungry US. (China figures in there, too, as does Iran, which Kleveman believes is a more serious contender.) Wherever the author travels, he turns up convincing evidence of the international race to secure the mineral wealth of the Caspian Sea basin, “the world’s biggest untapped fossil fuel resources,” at least three times larger than stores within the US, potentially representing some five percent of the world market. All of which explains, he thinks, why American interests began working in the 1990s to build a pipeline from the bizarre dictatorship of Turkmenistan—“Stalin’s Disneyland,” in Kleveman’s memorable phrase—through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and on to the Indian Ocean, much to the annoyance of Russia’s Yeltsin and Putin administrations. The author provides plenty of whip-smart asides to entertain and enlighten the armchair traveler: “Turkmenistan is probably the only country in the world where a taxi to the airport is more expensive than the ensuing flight”; “The cockpit door opens, and one of the two Ukrainian pilots greets me with a heavy accent and a strong whiff of vodka, ‘Come in! Welcome! No problem, don’t worry, no problem!’ ” They do not detract from the solid case he builds for thinking that American adventurism in the region is less about national security than about lining the pockets of oil industry executives.
A well-argued, well-observed journey into a little-known area likely to be of much importance in days to come.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-906-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
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
© 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.
