by Yaakov Katz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019
A valuable document for understanding Israel’s defense policy and its broader effects on the Middle East as a whole.
A detailed account of a little-known episode in Middle Eastern history.
Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Katz (co-author: The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower, 2017, etc.) takes advantage of high-level contacts in the Israeli military and government to give the inside story of a bombing mission that preserved the balance between two rival powers. The story begins in 2007, with a visit by Meir Dagan, director of the Mossad, to the George W. Bush White House. Dagan met with the director of the National Security Agency and Vice President Dick Cheney, showing them photos of a site in Syria that Israeli intelligence believed to be a nuclear reactor under construction. With some help from American intelligence, that interpretation was confirmed. However, Bush decided not to take direct action, which left it to Israel to determine how to respond to the threat. The decision was complicated by Israel’s setbacks in its 2006 conflict with Hezbollah along the Syrian border, which left that nation in an apparently weak defensive posture. Furthermore, the clear evidence of a North Korean role in Syria’s reactor project raised the critical issue of nuclear proliferation. Katz takes readers inside the discussions at the White House, the Israeli National Security Council, and the Israeli Defense Forces, and he profiles key figures in the mission and in the political discussions preceding it, many of whom are probably unfamiliar to many American readers. We get close-up looks at former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and Amos Yadlin, head of Israeli military intelligence. The author also explores the early career of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad as part of the analysis of Syria’s response to the attack. On the whole, Katz makes a solid case that the attack, which largely escaped wide public attention at the time, had profound implications for nuclear nonproliferation policy, the ongoing Syrian civil war, and the U.S.–Israel relationship.
A valuable document for understanding Israel’s defense policy and its broader effects on the Middle East as a whole.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19127-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by Yaakov Katz & Amir Bohbot
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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