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
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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