An important text studded with keen insights into a nation about which America remains dangerously misinformed.
Former CIA agent Baer (Blow the House Down, 2006, etc.) examines Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East, fundamentally challenging commonly held U.S. views.
America doesn’t recognize or understand this rising superpower, the author argues. Dissecting Iran’s rapid evolution, the Baer notes numerous examples of modernization—use of the Internet, a burgeoning youth culture, sexual freedom—that are rarely reported outside the country. His central aim is to establish how Iran has maneuvered into a dominant position in the Middle East, largely thanks to the war in Iraq. By weakening the Iraqi army and decimating the moderate Shia clergy, Baer contends, the United States has unwittingly opened the gateway for Iran to seize control of Iraq’s oil resources. As evidence of this, he points to the Afghan city of Herat, now full of Iranian goods, including gasoline. A radical new approach is required, the author suggests, if America is to gain leverage with Iran. This will involve negotiating with the country to turn it into an ally, not an enemy. The book’s most intriguing passages analyze the mind-set that has enabled Iran to attain such a powerful position. Iran’s leaders keep their military authorities hidden, they don’t keep important paperwork, and they have learned valuable lessons from past mistakes, particularly those made during the bloody 1980–88 war with Iraq. Terrorist tactics have waned, Baer notes; there have been no known instances of Iranian suicide bombers since 1988, and behavior typified by notorious Iranian terrorist Imad Mughniyah has become a thing of the past. Many of the author’s interviewees, including a former aide to Ayatollah Khomeini, believe that Iran is already a superpower, and Baer concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for the United States to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the country’s leaders.
An important text studded with keen insights into a nation about which America remains dangerously misinformed.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40864-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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 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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