A sharp look at the Arab world’s wallet, offering mostly bad news—and little room for hope.
The economy of the Arab world is a sick cousin to the world’s major markets. And it’s getting sicker by the minute.
“In the West,” former Wall Street Journal and current Boston Globe correspondent Glain observes, “it is naturally assumed that a shrinking economy leads to rising crime.” Yet, he continues, Western analysts seem not to extend the same logic to the Arab world, where “jaundiced economies” are the fruit of corruption, stagnation, astonishingly inequitable wealth distribution, and the systemic failure of Arab nations to develop sustainable markets or trade alliances. (Whereas a century ago Egypt, for one, enjoyed international commerce equaling half of its GDP, Glain writes that today “trade among any of the Arab states is negligible.”) Despite oil wealth, which rests in the control of a handful of families, real per-capita growth in the Arab world averaged less than 1 percent annually; the middle class has been shrinking, the intelligentsia fleeing, and the 22 nations of the Arab world have seen a radical fall in standards of living; as the economist Hernando de Soto has observed, those nations lack the institutions to make capital liquid and available to local investors, crushing job creation. Add to all that a rapidly exploding population and the attendant growing number of the young, idle, and disaffected, and you have the perfect recipe for instability—and for fundamentalism, and for terrorism. And what has the West been doing in response? Led by the US, writes Glain, it has been cosseting corrupt dynasties, backing Israel at the expense of other nations in the region, alienated potential friends—and, of course, launching invasions. In the last regard especially, the US has been of no help; writes Glain, for all its faults, Saddam Hussein’s government was “not only a dictatorship; it was the country’s largest employer and consumer”—a role the occupier has yet to step into, which may have something to do with Iraqi anger today.
A sharp look at the Arab world’s wallet, offering mostly bad news—and little room for hope.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32911-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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