A sober and sane but not pessimistic look at what may emerge from the current Arab crises.
A BBC journalist makes a cogent prognosis for the post-revolutionary Arab world.
As the dust continues to settle after the Arab Spring, former Middle East bureau chief Danahar sifts through the chaos for some order and even hope after dictators fall and a new configuration of religion and politics takes root. The author, present at many of the recent events in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Israel and Syria, walks readers through the region-altering revolutions since President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” forced the first dictator to topple in Iraq 10 years ago. The American occupation created a cataclysmic meddling of the power balance between Shia and Sunni factions, forcing a sectarian lawlessness that no one wants repeated in Syria. Indeed, one of the biggest lessons was that, in the words of the Arab American Institute’s Dr. James Zogby, “America’s leverage is much less than it was ten years ago.” As the fed-up young populaces of other Arab countries began demanding the end of dictatorships, America had to stand back and watch, whether it liked the outcome or not. The Arabs are wrestling with what they want their countries to look like: religious states or democracies? In Israel, too, which Danahar notes must stop regarding itself as a European spa and grasp its pivotal Middle Eastern role, the secular versus the religious is playing out in deeply divisive ways. In Libya, the author finds the idea of a “Year Zero,” which offers a “clean slate” to the Libyan people and much cause for optimism. However, in blood-soaked Syria, where the government barbarity against its citizens is viewed live worldwide, the people have similarly learned the terrible lesson that “there will be no foreign cavalry coming over the horizon.” Danahar’s analysis of this new configuration of power and principle is well-reasoned and useful.
A sober and sane but not pessimistic look at what may emerge from the current Arab crises.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-253-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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