A disturbing history that clearly reveals the dangerous “collective American delusion” about the Middle East, which the...
Seeking to align Egypt with the West, Dwight Eisenhower enacted disastrous foreign policy.
A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and formerly a senior director of the National Security Council under George W. Bush, Doran (Pan-Arabism before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question, 1999, etc.) offers a detailed analysis of the context for the Suez Crisis of 1956, which pitted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser against Britain, France, and Israel and nearly led to war. Drawing on British and American memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, the author argues persuasively that until 1958, Eisenhower deeply misjudged Nasser, convinced that he would help the U.S. by unifying Arabs against the Soviets in the Cold War. Even before Nasser moved to take control of the Suez Canal—through which two-thirds of European oil flowed—Eisenhower had pressed Britain to withdraw from Egypt, convinced that “the yoke of colonialism” undermined Western efforts to support Egyptian nationalism. But Nasser, Doran vociferously maintains, was never interested in alliance with the West; the young leader had one self-serving goal in mind: to dominate the Arab world. The author characterizes Nasser as devious, power hungry, “an inveterate blackmailer,” and “a born manipulator, a man who was never forthright with anyone—including the Americans.” Doran focuses closely on Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and emissary Kermit Roosevelt, who refused to recognize “the disturbing scope” of Nasser’s ambitions. Both were anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists; Doran stops short of branding them anti-Semites. They abetted Eisenhower’s policy of placating Nasser, even when it became obvious that he was negotiating with the Soviets, allowing them to make “deep inroads into the Arab world.” In 1958, Eisenhower finally realized that Nasser was a threat to Western interests; that the U.S. needed to pay attention to inter-Arab struggles, not only the Arab-Israeli conflict; and that “the solution to every problem will inevitably generate new problems.”
A disturbing history that clearly reveals the dangerous “collective American delusion” about the Middle East, which the author believes still persists today.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9775-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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