Yet another example of American foreign intrigues gone badly wrong: well-argued—but stomach-turning.
A commemoration, half a century later, of a transformative event that few today remember.
The event in question is the American-sponsored overthrow of the democratic regime of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which set in motion other events—including, suggests New York Times correspondent Kinzer (Crescent and Star, 2001), the eventual rise of Al Qaeda. Mossadegh, a moderate nationalist who was no fan of the British and American interests that tried to carve up Iran after WWII, had had the effrontery to nationalize the British-dominated oil industry and tried to steer Iran into a neutral position vis-à-vis the American-Soviet rivalry. This suited President Harry Truman fine, writes Kinzer: “He had nothing but contempt for old-style imperialists like those who ran Anglo-Iranian [Oil Company],” and even had a certain sympathy for nationalist movements, at least of the noncommunist variety. Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, had a different view; though he took pains to distance himself from operational details, he authorized the CIA and its allied agencies to engineer Mossadegh’s ouster. Many of those details were planned and effected by Middle East hand H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Gulf War general, and Kim Roosevelt, grandson of yet another president; the two recruited disaffected Iranian generals to carry out the deed, some of whom bragged openly about their new pals at the CIA and the rewards that would await them once they took Mossadegh out of circulation. The spooks had a somewhat harder time convincing the playboy Shah of Iran, Reza Mohammed Pahlavi, to abandon his jet-set ways and take power. Eventually, however, Iranian rebel tanks rolled, Mossadegh was put under house arrest for the last ten years of his life, and the shah’s reign of terror began, to end only with the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its infamous results.
Yet another example of American foreign intrigues gone badly wrong: well-argued—but stomach-turning.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-471-26517-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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