A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined, if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.
Extracting three episodes from a complex 35-year history, a distinguished Middle East scholar exposes America’s unfitness to mediate between Israel and Palestine.
Khalidi (Modern Arab Studies/Columbia Univ.; Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East, 2009, etc.) insists that the struggle over Palestine lies at the core of the Arab/Israeli conflict, with resolution impossible as long as the U.S. continues to act, in the words of one observer, as “Israel’s lawyer.” America, he writes, has only posed as an honest broker, deceiving the public with corrupted rhetoric about “progress” and “the peace process.” All the while, U.S. policymaking—with only a few Cold War exceptions—has been consistently driven by domestic political considerations distorted by Israel’s muscular congressional lobby, the alliance with Saudi Arabia and the quiet compliance of the other Arab Gulf states, and a complete disregard for the welfare of the Palestinians. Making use of a number of previously classified documents, Khalidi isolates three clarifying moments that illustrate America’s bias: the torpedoing of the so-called 1982 Reagan Plan by Menachem Begin’s narrow construction of the Camp David Accords; the bilateral Madrid-Washington negotiations of 1991-1993, especially revelatory of the collusion between the U.S. and Israel; and the Obama administration’s predictable retreat from anything resembling a new policy toward Palestine. Unpacking these episodes in sharp, take-no-prisoners prose, Khalidi maintains that the U.S. and Isreal, “by far the most powerful actors in the Middle East,” through successive administrations and a variety of key officials (Condoleezza Rice and Dennis Ross take a particular beating here), have conspired to deny Palestinians any semblance of self-determination.
A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined, if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0807044759
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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