Courageous ground-level reporting.
As the last U.S. combat battalions depart Iraq, a journalist tallies the staggering cost of the invasion and occupation.
American officials have largely deemed the surge in Iraq a success. Led by Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency strategy to integrate Iraqi army and police with U.S. forces to impose an overall security plan has now become the blueprint for Afghanistan and, who knows, for any future showdown with Iran. Rosen (In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, 2006) acknowledges that the surge, contrary to his expectations, has ended for now the civil war in Iraq, but views our entire involvement, from the invasion through today’s occupation, as disastrous. With Middle Eastern features inherited from his Iranian father, this New York City native has deftly employed his “melanin advantage” to blend into the countryside, the mosques, the villages and the neighborhoods of Iraq to report on the chaos, violence and terror attending America’s effort to remake the country. For Rosen, it’s an unrelenting tale of bombing, death squads, overflowing prisons, heightened factionalism, economic devastation and brutal suppression. Even the surge’s effectiveness he attributes less to an inspired general’s grand plan and more to an Iraqi resistance bought off by billions of American dollars. The American occupation, he maintains, has destroyed much, built little and only encouraged the spread of radical Islam. He charts the flow of fighters into Iraq, the exodus of millions of refugees and the war’s spillover into neighboring Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. He also traveled to Afghanistan for a heart-stopping visit as a “guest” of the Taliban. America entered Iraq promising liberation and democracy. Instead, writes the author, we substituted a different kind of terror from that imposed by Saddam, installed a corrupt government, further destabilized the region and lost most of our influence among the Arabs. As the Obama administration considers the way ahead in the Middle East, as the calendar in Afghanistan flips forward, Rosen’s account couldn’t be timelier.
Courageous ground-level reporting.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56858-401-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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