A disturbing account that prompts new admiration for a people whose age-old toil for a homeland will continue after the...
Stimulating history of the single Iraqi ethnic group that doesn’t want American troops to leave Iraq.
BBC correspondent Lawrence’s debut reviews the ancient struggle for independence of 25 million Kurds (the majority living in Turkey), a struggle they may be winning despite the opposition of the United States and every Middle Eastern nation. They seemed on the verge of success after the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I, but Kurdish leaders made the mistake—one they would repeat—of pinning their hopes on America. By the time they realized that Woodrow Wilson was unwilling to twist anyone’s arm to achieve a new world order of democracy and self-determination, Mustapha Kemal (later known as Ataturk) had created a modern Turkish state, and Britain had remapped the Middle East, leaving the Kurds inside Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The world ignored 70 years of violent revolt and oppression until the end of the first Gulf war in 1991. Hearing that the United States would look favorably on Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Iraqi Kurds rose again, trusting that America would help. Only widespread revulsion at Hussein’s brutal reaction persuaded Western nations to act. They enforced a “no-fly” zone in Northern Iraq, essentially preventing Hussein’s army from entering and creating a reasonable facsimile of an independent Kurdistan. Still insecure, the Kurds cooperated enthusiastically with U.S. planning for a second invasion—which began well before 2003, the author avers. They also did not join in the chaos that followed. Lawrence emphasizes repeatedly that America is greasing the squeaky wheel in Iraq, obsessively concerned with unruly Sunnis and Shiites at the expense of Kurds who would love a permanent American military presence to protect them from Turkey, Iran and the Iraqi Arab majority.
A disturbing account that prompts new admiration for a people whose age-old toil for a homeland will continue after the United States withdraws from the region.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1611-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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
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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