A wrenching, important work of historical scholarship demanding justice for the victims.
Powerfully moving testimonies from prisoners who survived the brutal crackdowns in Tehran in 1988 by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
After eight years of destructive war with Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran finally submitted to the cease-fire codified by a U.N. Security Council resolution in 1988. A few days later, Khomeini appeared on TV and, as he put it, drank this “chalice of poison.” Indeed, it was a bitter blow to the IRI, which already had prisons full of dissenters from 1981 onward; some had survived previous waves of executions. At the border with Iraq, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran tried to rise up and were brutally suppressed; many were captured and sent to Evin and Gohardasht prisons. Thus the vengeance against these so-called Monafeqin, or hypocrites, began, carried out by paramilitary gangs in the streets and elsewhere. Most prisoners were interrogated multiple times, and any Mojahedin-branded prisoner who would not “repent,” even those who had served their original sentences, were marked for execution. For several weeks in July and August, the victims were terrorized with blindfolds, forced confessions, torture, and often death (4,500 to 5,000 victims). At the time, little information about the atrocities was available—only what prisoners could glean from each other and the guards. According to Mohajer, who offers a solid introduction, the same scenario played out in other prisons across Iran. The massacre eliminated a large population of Mojahedin and successfully destroyed the Iranian leftist movement for decades to come. Those who remained were deeply scarred, but some escaped. This heartbreaking but necessary text also includes interviews with mothers of the disappeared, a group called the Movement of the Mothers of Khavaran, “who may be likened to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo of Argentina.” The book also features a foreword by Angela Davis, a timeline, and an immensely helpful 17-page glossary.
A wrenching, important work of historical scholarship demanding justice for the victims.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78607-777-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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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