by Robert F. Worth ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 2016
A crucial portrait of a deeply troubled region.
How the Arab Spring, begun in hope, has resulted in despair.
In his debut book, Worth, former chief of the New York Times Beirut bureau, draws on his intimate knowledge of the Middle East to offer a penetrating, unsettling analysis. The protests that marked the Arab Spring began in Tunisia in January 2011; within two weeks, Egypt followed, when thousands surged into Tahrir Square chanting for an end to corruption, abuse, and repression. Outbursts in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria ensued, portending sweeping changes in the region. But those changes were far from what the protesters intended. As the author has seen, “the demands for dignity and civic rights have been transformed into conflicts that loosened the very building blocks of social and political belonging.” The Arab Spring “was not so much a beginning as an end.” Country by country, Worth traces the genesis and aftermath of the protests: new regimes, one after another, enacted fatal mistakes in government; internal rivalries undermined unity; and Islamist extremists gained increasing power over a desperate population. Repeatedly, the author reports, the ousting of repressive governments and “the loosening of state authority” gave rise to civil wars: “People who had trusted each other for decades now saw barriers rising between them. The world was suddenly full of threats to all that was sacred: to the state, to your clan, to God.” Fueling the wars was a “virus of religious hatred” that attracted zealots on all sides. Many joined the Islamic State group, whose propaganda—90,000 messages per day on social media in 2014—inspired in some a sense of patriotism and purpose. Among the original protestors in the Arab Spring, many were jailed, renounced politics, or ended up depressed. Worth found one who joined the Islamic State group and died in a suicide bombing. Informing the vivid narrative are many revealing interviews as well as the author’s own eyewitness accounts of events.
A crucial portrait of a deeply troubled region.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-25294-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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