An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.
A powerful account of “extensive U.S. meddling” in a foreign government, “a habit it perfected in the Congo.”
The plot hatched by the CIA under the Eisenhower administration to rid the newly independent Congo of its elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was considered a “model” intervention at the time. As Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs, shows, the Congo proved to be the first “theater” in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union transformed the Cold War “into a truly global struggle.” In this carefully nuanced study, the author underscores how ill-advised American officials were at the time about Lumumba and his supposed communist intentions. Fears of a communist takeover were perpetuated by the CIA’s station chief in the Congo at the time, Larry Devlin, and others who failed to fully grasp the significance of many African nations’ long struggles to decolonize. On June 30, 1960, the Congo tentatively declared itself free from Belgian rule, and UN peacekeeping forces were stationed there to aid the transition. However, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, wary of the newly elected Lumumba, who he thought “was being used by leftist Africans and the Soviet Union,” refused his plea for more aid to help quell a military mutiny and secessionist worries. When Lumumba turned to the Soviets for help (Nikita Khrushchev was largely noncommittal), the Americans sprang into action. Reid grippingly narrates the horrific tale of Lumumba’s imprisonment, torture, and execution by the henchmen of then-army chief Joseph Mobutu, a former Lumumba protégé and eager recipient of American cash. Sifting through significant new documentation, the author casts tremendous clarity on this important period and how essentially the world looked away. “The rest of the world seemed to decide [that] in the Congo, occasional barbarity was the price of stability.”
An evenhanded work of deep scholarship that clearly elucidates a largely hidden piece of U.S. foreign policy.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781524748814
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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