A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is “fragile, shimmering, evanescent”—and perhaps doomed.
The Lebanese-born French author offers a pensive, lyrical meditation on a dying world.
The author of brilliant novels and books of essays such as Disordered World, Maalouf announces his theme at the outset: “I was born hale and healthy into the arms of a dying civilization, and I have spent my whole life feeling that I am surviving, with no credit or blame, when around me so many things were falling into ruin.” At first, he means the vanished civilization of the Levant, where Christians, Jews, and Arabs once lived together but that has since collapsed in ethnocidal battles and sectarian wars. “The Levantine ideal,” writes Maalouf, “as my people experienced it, as I have always wanted to live it, demands that each person assume full responsibility for his own, and a little responsibility for others.” No more. Born in Beirut in 1949, a Maronite Christian, Maalouf lived in the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “the last colossus of the Arab world,” who ultimately failed in his mission to unite it; in adulthood, Maalouf moved to Paris, where he has lived for decades. Egypt, he writes, “was doomed to crumble,” while Lebanon’s ecumenicalism gave way to narrow self-interest and appeals to outsiders of one’s own ethnicity for support—Arabs calling for Arabs and Jews for Jews, which Maalouf likens to various Swiss cantons calling on their German, French, and Italian neighbors for intercession, which would spell doom for the Swiss Confederation. The analogy is apposite, for the rest of the world is also suffering collapse. “In the era in which we live,” writes the author, “despair can sweep across oceans, scale walls, cross any frontier, physical or mental, and it is not easily contained.” Ideals of democracy, citizenship, environmental health, world peace, and the like now fall before nationalism, authoritarianism, and the decline of private life in the Orwellian present.
A Camus for our time, Maalouf urges that civilization is “fragile, shimmering, evanescent”—and perhaps doomed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64286-075-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: World Editions
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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