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 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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