A mostly insightful examination of these “Mad Men on the Nile.”
By turns admiring and critical play-by-play of CIA Arabists as they directed the Cold War’s Middle East chessboard.
As the blowback from America’s meddling in the Middle East continues to return in the form of the toppling of dictators long supported by Washington, Wilford (History/California State Univ., Long Beach; The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, 2008, etc.) spotlights the activities of several prominent CIA Arabists who helped manipulate the Cold War regimes in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Jordan and others, often to contradictory and devastating effect. Grandsons of Theodore Roosevelt, raised cavorting around Long Island, and educated at Groton, Archie and Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, close in age, both gravitated toward action in North Africa and the Muslim world during World War II under the aegis of the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) in Cairo. With the British imperial presence in the region on the wane, the U.S. officers moved to fill the gap: These included the Roosevelts, Miles Copeland, Stephen Penrose, Harold Hoskins and others, who were steeped in Arabic and resolved to encourage a more nationalistic, anti-Zionist approach in Palestine. Working with the American oil industry and Jewish groups like the American Council for Judaism, they attempted to galvanize U.S. public opinion against Zionism. This was defeated, however, by President Harry S. Truman, who, facing re-election, instantly recognized Israel in 1948. Wilford tracks the Arabists as the Cold War ensued from capitals in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as the “crypto-diplomats” worked to put in place nationalistic strongmen who were supposed to be pro-Western and anti-Communist but often proved problematic and intractable, culminating in the Iranian coup of 1953 and the Suez Crisis.
A mostly insightful examination of these “Mad Men on the Nile.”Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-01965-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
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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