Less useful than Ray Takeyh’s broader-ranging Hidden Iran (2006), but an important contribution to a debate that is still...
Former UN weapons inspector Ritter, outspoken critic of the Bush WMD strategy in the run-up to Iraq, warns that it’s about to be déjà-vu-all-over again next door.
Iran, of course, is one leg of the axis-of-evil tripod, bent on developing nuclear weapons to use against us. That is the administration’s contention, as yet without proof. No matter; its ongoing battle with Iran is driven, Ritter asserts, by “the hyperbole and speculative rhetoric of those whose true agenda lies more in changing the regime in Tehran than it does with genuine non-proliferation and disarmament”—specifically neoconservatives such as John Bolton, the UN-hating ambassador to the UN, who have yearned for payback since the fall of the Shah. Ritter’s argument gets a little disjointed as it whiplashes through time and place, but it centers on this point: Israel’s interests are not necessarily those of the U.S., yet the matter of Iran is “a conflict born in Israel,” based on the conviction that the government of Iran is out to destroy it; Washington has followed Tel Aviv’s lead uncritically, steered by those very neocons and their project to force a confrontation with the mullahs. Ritter maintains that Iran has generally conformed to international rules regarding the development of its nuclear-energy program and has approached the Bush administration to engage in one-on-one talks; yet the U.S. government has worked diligently to persuade the European Union and other bodies that as an important exporter of oil, Iran has “no justifiable economic explanation for its nuclear program.” The argument has not yet swayed the International Atomic Energy Agency or the UN, and so the administration may once again go it alone—and indeed, the latest National Security Strategy has “singled out Iran as representing the greatest threat” to the U.S., a clear signal. That way, Ritter notes gloomily, lies disaster.
Less useful than Ray Takeyh’s broader-ranging Hidden Iran (2006), but an important contribution to a debate that is still shaping up.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-936-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
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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