A vivid picture of the crushing difficulties faced by every Arab government.
Absorbing history emphasizing Lebanon’s disastrous post–World War II years.
France and Britain created Lebanon after World War I for purely selfish reasons, explains veteran Middle East journalist Mackey (The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, 2002, etc.). She adds that no change in boundaries would have produced a country whose people shared national feeling and democratic institutions, because these were absent throughout the Middle East. At independence in 1946, an informal agreement divided the Lebanese parliament and bureaucracy among Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians and Sunni, Shia and Druze Muslims. This feeble government exerted little control over the leaders of these sects, who gained influence by granting favors, pulling strings and quashing ambitious opponents. In return they expected absolute loyalty and permanent high office; none paid attention to the public good. Ironically, this corrupt system led to a permissive, laissez-faire economy whose initial prosperity in the 1950s led observers to call Lebanon the Switzerland of the Middle East. This fantasy evaporated in 1958 when a Maronite boss, Camille Chamoun, violated the status quo by arranging his reelection as president. Although trivial compared with later catastrophes, the year-long civil war that ensued claimed several thousand lives before Chamoun resigned. Calm returned, but government weakness persisted, aggravated by the 1970s influx of Palestinians. Their guerrilla raids infuriated Israel, whose repeated retaliations ravaged the nation. A 1975 clash between Palestinian and Maronite militia escalated into another civil war, this one lasting 15 years. It was aggravated by Israeli incursions, the arrival of U.S. forces (which quickly left in 1983 after a suicide bomber killed 240 Marines), and a Syrian invasion followed by an occupation that ended only in 2005. The 1989 cease-fire left the government unreformed and the nation prostrate, bankrupt and even more divided along sectarian lines. Mackey interrupts this relentlessly depressing account with histories of other Arab nations, stressing parallels with Lebanon’s experience.
A vivid picture of the crushing difficulties faced by every Arab government.Pub Date: March 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06218-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
