Docherty demonstrates, a bit murkily, that the Khyber Pass remains central to the transmission of cultures, religions and...
Strategic history of the 30-mile stretch within the White Mountains that forms an uneasy border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Today the Khyber Pass functions as a turbulent alley for international gunrunning against the resurgent Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies. It has always been a frontier, notes first-time author Docherty: “an ancient zone of contested ground, long disputed and never entirely at peace.” Because it marks the northwest front line to the Indian subcontinent, it has served as a crucial gateway for armies and ideas, from Persian king Darius’s penetration into the rich lands of India in the fifth century B.C.E. to the winding down of the British Raj in 1947. Alexander the Great came through the pass and conquered the Punjab but didn’t stay long; the area was subsequently ruled by India’s Mauryan dynasty. The Kushans, a wayward Chinese clan, disseminated Buddhism to the rest of the world through the pass, which later enabled the first Muslims to introduce Islam to South Asia. Genghis Khan was followed by the Mughal Empire, the rise of Sikh power in the Punjab and repeated Afghan incursions. The Khyber Pass was the furthest outpost of the British Empire; once the British army occupied Afghanistan in 1838, nearly perpetual warfare was necessary to keep open the vital route between Kabul and India. No invading army has gone through the pass since Pakistan took control of the region in 1947, but it again became a hot spot in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Docherty alleviates his somewhat benumbing history of successive empires with livelier accounts of actual visits. Most unsettling is his tour of Darra Adam Khel, deep inside the Tribal Areas, where a centuries-old tradition of gunmaking ensures “the plentiful supply of cheap firearms [that] has long helped the region to maintain its reputation as a wild frontier.”
Docherty demonstrates, a bit murkily, that the Khyber Pass remains central to the transmission of cultures, religions and weaponry throughout the region.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78672-092-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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