A captivating though somewhat unwieldy look at the ongoing animus between conservatives and reformists in Iran—played out recently in the reaction to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s grip on power.
Veteran Christian Science Monitor bureau chief Peterson (Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda, 2000) reports from 13 years of close observance of the changing Iranian landscape, especially as it is misinterpreted by the West. He begins with a rather startling comparison between Iran and the United States in terms of a “national mission”—one that defines itself in opposition to a foreign, imperialist power (British and Russian influence, in Iran’s case) and based on faith (“In God We Trust”). Humiliated by America’s support of the Shah in a 1953 coup, at the expense of the popularly elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Iranians grew to mistrust Americans, whom they loved for their culture but abhorred for their support of the Shah’s repressive regime. The Islamic Republic, heralded by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, had to deal with a debilitating war with Iraq, the Iran-Contra scandal, Israeli aggression and American diplomatic flip-flopping—the latest of which was being labeled an axis of evil by Bush II. The so-called True Believers were steeped in the beliefs of Imam Hossein, “the seventh-century ‘Lord of Martyrs’ who rode willingly into a battle he couldn’t win, knowing he faced certain death,” and other propaganda tales fed by the current crop of films that Peterson has viewed. The author is most astute in evaluating the relatively recently rise and fall of reformer philosopher-cleric Seyyed Mohammad Khatami, who won election as president in 1997 and ushered well-welcomed reforms, yet was undercut by conservatives keen on limiting the rampant Westernization among youths. Peterson also examines the startling accession of power of the mayor of Tehran, his cronyism and his belief in a messianic component to his election. The author offers convincing evidence that Ahmadinejad’s election was craftily rigged, precipitating the still-simmering revolution of June 2009. A thoroughgoing, headlong plunge into answering the Iranian lament that “Americans don’t know us.”
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9728-5
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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