Carefully done, and an important resource for observers of the Middle East.
When historians consider the period between the Yom Kippur War and the present, they may conclude that only Israel’s nuclear capability kept it from being annihilated by the Arab enemies that surrounded it.
So writes Jerusalem-based journalist Karpin in this account of Israel’s long experience with nuclear weaponry. The nation, Karpin writes, “attained nuclear capability during the second half of 1966,” though, because of its well-founded policy of ambiguity, it has never acknowledged that power. In fact, Israel began working on nuclear weapons as soon as the Holocaust ended, David Ben-Gurion having vowed “never again,” and meaning it. By 1946, unknown to the British administrators of what was then Palestine, Jewish groups were receiving parts for what would be the Dimona nuclear facility courtesy of “the Sonneborn Institute,” a group of wealthy Americans who “would contribute millions of dollars to buy munitions, machinery, hospital equipment and medicines, and ships to carry refugees to Eretz Yisrael.” Not long afterward, Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer called on Ben-Gurion and let slip “that the best way to accumulate plutonium was to burn natural uranium in a nuclear reactor,” and so it would be, thanks in good measure to sympathetic figures within the French government who saw to it that certain ingredients got to Israel. The Israeli government has held fast to its policy of ambiguity; if it had admitted to nuclear capability, Karpin suggests, the Six-Day War may have heated up precipitously, with the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. stepping in and very likely recapitulating the Cuban Missile Crisis. The emergent question now, he concludes, is how Israel would react to the development of an Iranian nuclear program—very probably with force, assuming that the U.S. did not act first.
Carefully done, and an important resource for observers of the Middle East.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6594-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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
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 2026 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.
