An intimate, full, and insightful account of the Suez Crisis from the then head of the Israeli chief of staff's bureau. Mordechai Bar-On draws not only from official army sources and from a massive research effort, but from his personal diary kept while serving as General Moshe Dayan's recording secretary. The reader is therefore privy to many a tense moment shared by Israelis like Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Dayan, and Golda Meir, while the author fleshes out the global picture with quotes from the likes of Egypt's Nasser, England's Eden, America's Dulles and the UN's Hammarskjold. Bar-On documents the fact that Israel did contemplate a pre-emptive attack on Egypt after Soviet arms turned Nasser into the regional power. But Israel canceled those plans, insists the author, after the French sold her sufficient weapons to defend herself. Contrary to popular conceptions, Bar-On attempts to establish that it was only Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal and the subsequent Anglo-French decision to invade that brought Israel into the picture. The British are shown to have done Israel dirty after promising diplomatic support to cover the Jewish state's takeover of the Sinai peninsula. Bar-On sees Israel winning long-term gains while losing her claims to Sinai, Gaza (sound familiar?), and a toe-hold on the Straits of Tiran. The Eisenhower Doctrine is seen as assuring Israel's diplomatic defeat, but Bar-On looks to the period of 1957-1967 to underscore what the Sinai misadventure gained for Israel: It ``reasserted Israel's deterrent capability,'' allowed the young nation and the port of Eilat to bloom, and even gave her the right to casus belli with the renewed Red Sea blockade of 1967. A valuable, multidimensional history of a crucial period in Cold War and Mideast history.
Pub Date: May 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10586-X
Page Count: 408
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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 Yorker staff 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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