For that, Goldfarb blames the Bush administration, closing with a reasoned but white-hot denunciation of American...
A moving tribute, by NPR correspondent Goldfarb, to his Kurdish translator, guide and friend, an early victim of post-conquest terror in Iraq.
Ahmad Shawkat was a man of parts: a secular Muslim happily married to a believer, frequently imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime, he was a lecturer in histopathology and anatomy at the University of Mosul who also “lived the life of an old-fashioned man of letters, writing fiction and criticism and giving lectures to his medical students on literature.” He was also a fine translator, Goldfarb was glad to learn, able to give an accurate sense of a document or communication that needed only a gloss, but also able to add nuance and shading to a statement when the situation called. In these pages, Ahmad keeps Goldfarb alive over the course of a season of war, dodging bullets fired from all sides; he also takes him into territory that few other correspondents got to, where he was able to gauge Iraqi suspicions of their supposed liberators, the Americans. (Says one Iraqi man, “I know and I understand very well that there are no mass destructions weapons in Iraq. And Mr. Bush knows that very well. . . . They will find nothing.” Another wonders why anyone in the American government would take Ahmed Chalabi seriously.) When the Americans take control, Ahmad secures a grant to open an institute to teach his fellow Iraqis about democracy and founds a journal, writing editorials that displease the “arrogant political careerists” of the occupation government as much as they do hard-core Ba’athists. In the end, Ahmad is shot down in the street, forever silenced. Goldfarb makes plain that this was exactly the sort of man the new Iraq needs, never mind that the American occupation government “seemed hell-bent on making sure the Iraq that Ahmad envisioned would never exist.”
For that, Goldfarb blames the Bush administration, closing with a reasoned but white-hot denunciation of American imperialism. One of the best of the many books to emerge from the Iraq invasion.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1515-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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