A riveting chronicle from a courageous journalist who was there to witness and report the truth. A book that should...
A harrowing, deeply researched look inside a country riven by a brutal, long-running dictatorship that would rather destroy the country and its people than relinquish power.
To understand Bashar al-Assad’s use of lies and terror to subjugate his people, journalist Dagher, who spent more than 15 years covering the Middle East, including the Syrian civil war, for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times (he was expelled from Syria in 2014), looks first at the regime of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who established the violent playbook. Hafez and his right-hand man, Mustafa Tlass, seized power in 1963 and created a dreaded secret police force, brutally eliminating all opponents and inklings of opposition. Assad's second son, Bashar, who was enlisted as successor only when his “golden knight” older brother was killed in a car wreck, assumed power in 2000 upon his father’s death. He was packaged as a “reform” leader, and he was courted by world leaders especially after 9/11 as the lynchpin in fighting Islamic terrorism in the Middle East. Meticulously and systematically, Dagher shows how the glamorous front concealed the truth: Assad was behind the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005; he was enjoying the full support of Hezbollah and Iran; and, when the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, he employed the murderous tactics of his father across the country. His support by Iran and ultimately Russia allowed him to remain in power by presenting the Syrian civil war as necessary in defeating the Islamic State. Dagher scored a highly valuable source for this work, Manaf Tlass, son of Mustafa, who was, as the familial roles played out, Bashar’s own right arm in the early years of his rule (he defected to France in 2012). Besides insiders, the author interviewed numerous opposition leaders who endured terror and torture to challenge Assad’s dictatorship yet “must surrender to the fact that there’s nothing we can do if the entire world wants Bashar to stay.”
A riveting chronicle from a courageous journalist who was there to witness and report the truth. A book that should deservedly garner significant award attention.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-55672-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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