[ The Bin Ladens ] [ Blood and Soil ] [ Production Culture ] [ Barbarossa ] [ Algeria ]
[ Oxford Atlas of the World ] [ Atlas of Medieval Europe ] [ Our Dumb World ] [ Holocaust Survivor Cookbook ]
[ Timeline of World War II ]

Osama Bin Laden Sprang
From Saudi Family Of 54

UHAMMAD BIN LADEN came to Saudi Arabia from Yemen in the 1920s, established a family consisting of 22 wives and 54 children. By the time he died in a plane crash in 1967, his Saudi Binladen Group based in Jeddah and often compared to Halliburton, was the paramount palace and highway builder in the kingdom.

The group’s international construction projects included the Cairo International Airport, Kuala Lumpur International and Amman Grand Hyatt Hotel.

Out of this privileged family, as close as this to the royal Sauds, sprung the world’s most notorious terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

Steve Coll, a staff writer of The New Yorker and formerly managing editor of the Washington Post, has produced a thorough study of the bin Laden origins, family relations, business relationships, culminating in the saga of Osama.

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century, contains a fascinating chapter that details the aftermath of Osama’s attack on America on 9/11. There were bin Ladens, studying or living in the U.S., who feared for their lives. Some said they got threat threats. Even though the nation’s air lanes were closed down, the Bush administration, and the FBI, flew them out of the country. They were accompanied on their chartered plane by two Jews: Bob Bernstein, a Ryan Air executive, and Jason Blum, a private security guard. Blum was not allowed to carry a weapon, but relied on his training in martial arts.

The Bin laden kids were devastated that so many policemen and firemen had died during rescue attempts at the demolished World Trace Center. "I was explaining to them," Blum said, "that that’s what we do. It’s like a mental defect that we have – instead of running away, we go after it."

You can imagine what repercussions Osama’s action had on the family. It was a time for damage control. Abdullah, 35, stayed behind in Boston to salvage the family’s reputation. He met with a communications strategist in New York. Abdullah regarded the man’s Jewish heritage as "a plus." In fact, he asked the public relations expert if he knew any Jewish lawyers. (The Penguin Press, 671 pages, $35.00 Amazon.com Price: $19.17 ).

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ENOCIDE has been a bloody sport of governments from time immemorial. For a comprehensive study of this history you can’t beat Blood and Soil, "a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur," by history professor Ben Kiernan who is the founding director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp).

Besides the obvious, such as Hitler’s final solution of the Jewish problem, Kiernan investigates the genocidal campaign of the early American colonizers who displaced the natives from their ancestral lands.

"Jeffersonian democracy," he writes, "based on territorial expansion and European immigration, also required that Indians give up their lifestyle, their lands, or their lives – without the vote."

In our day genocide was rampant at close of the 21^st century when Pakistan, Indonesia and Guatemala where "three of the globe’s most brutal military dictatorships – in Indonesia, Pakistan and Guatemala – set out to annihilate large opposition movements by the mass slaughter not only of political opponents but also of ethnic, national or racial communities. All three regimes enjoyed U.S. and other international support." (Yale University Press, 724 pages, $40.00 Amazon.com Price: $26.40 ).

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Give The Public
What It Wants

roduction Culture is subtitled Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, and if you can get past its strenuous verbosity and heavy-handed circumlocution, you will be rewarded with an insightful panorama of the film and television industry. John Thornton Caldwell, professor and chair of cinema and media studies at the University of California/Los Angeles, describes in excruciating detail all you ever want to know about new media production.

In a chapter headed "Industrial identity Theory," Caldwell exposes is the lie that film/television executives always give the public what it wants.

Actually the studios rollout the same sorts of films and series that they have always rolled out. Brand building and employee development have resulted in homogeneous executive workforces, "creating a situation where diversity of thought is a rare commodity indeed."

The industry is far less diverse "than what is reflected in U.S. demographic trends overall." (Duke University Press, soft cover, 452 pages, $25.95 Amazon.com Price: $20.87 ).

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Barbarossa 1941 delivers on its subtitle: Hitler’s War of Annihilation. Geoffrey Megargee, Applied Research Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, has produced a spellbinding day-by-day account of Hitler’s brutal, cruel, uncivilized "total war" in 1941 to conquer Russia, enslave the Slavic people and murder all the Jews and Communists in his path to European domination. Hitler’s military blunders and Russia’s infamous winter climate combined to thwart his march to victory in the east. (Tempus/Trafalgar Square, 256 pages, $35.00 Used and New available from Amazon.com Price: from $19.99 ).

Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed is a story that engages your interest as it recounts a nation’s fight to liberate itself from colonial rule only to slide into fratricidal slaughter between secularist Arabs and Islamists. Trying to establish democracy under these circumstances has proved in vain so far. In the 1992 elections the Islamists were poised to win, only to have victory snatched away to prevent them from taking power. Tension has been building ever since. If we get a respite from the troubles with Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq Israel-Palestine, we may well find Algeria to be the next powder keg to explode in the Middle East. Well written by Martin Evans, professor of contemporary history at the University of Portsmouth, England, and John Phillips, who reported from Algeria for The Times of London. (Yale University Press, 352 pages, $35.00 Amazon.com Price: $23.10 ).

Oxford Atlas of the World is a stupendous piece of work, a magnificent accessory for a sophisticated coffee table, to be perused and studied at will. This 14^th edition brings joy and insight every time I uncover the oversized pages to gaze at the world beyond. It is divided in sections that make it easy to find anything. The Gazeteer has profiles of every country; City Maps covers 69 urban areas around the world; an 83,000 name Index; 179 amazing pages of World Maps; satellite Images of Earth showing 16 regions and cities, and more. It’s a must-have resource for the student, scholar and educated consumer. (Oxford University Press, 449 pages, $80.00 Amazon.com Price: $50.40 ).

Atlas of Medieval Europe is a history of Europe from the beginning of the Dark Ages in 500 CE through the glory of the Middle Ages to 1519, the year Leonardo da Vinci died. Profusely illustrated with gorgeous artwork and illuminating charts and maps, this volume is a beautiful addition to any library and for every student of history. Angus Konstam, curator of Arms and Armor at the Tower of London and chief curator of the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Florida, has produced quite an attractive work. (Mercury Books, 192 pages, $25.00 Amazon.com Price: $19.50 ).

Our Dumb World from The Onion is one book you shouldn’t be caught carrying aboard a flight. It may cause convulsions of laughter, page after page, and flight attendants are not predisposed to tolerate rolling in the aisles. The cover of this atlas of the planet promises a free globe inside. I’m still flipping pages to find it. Every map is replete with amazing tidbits about every country in the world: Peru identifies several ancient sites, such as "the world’s deepest emptiest tip box," Mexico has "a diarrhea slick" off the western coast, Sierra Leone calls its capital Freetown "home to Africa’s largest deposits of irony," Iran pays tribute to the "Iranian who thinks every effigy looks like ex-girlfriend," Hungary boasts the "largest goulash lake in Europe," and Ukraine, with a long and proud tradition of existing, shows a "virgin farm (closed)" near a "Cancer Belt" that contains "glowing beet fields." (Little, Brown, 245 hysterical pages (expect nothing less from The Onion), $27.99  Amazon.com Price: $18.47 ).

Holocaust Survivor Cookbook is not your regular book of recipes. It is a collection, lovingly compiled, of cooking secrets gathered from Holocaust survivors the world over. As you study the secrets of their Old World culinary creations and gather the ingredients of their recipes, you can look at their portraits and learn their stories of escape and rescue from the terror. They’re all here, from appetizers like Bubbie Ginendel’s Gefilte Fish to such salads as Tomatoes, Onions and Sardines to soups, breads, kugels and such main dishes as Calf Brains and Gedempte Fleish (stew) and apricots. Caras & Associates, spiral hardcover, 360 pages, $36. Order at www.survivorcookbook.org.

The Timeline of World War II opens with a chapter on World War I as an introduction to the six years of the greatest conflict of the 20^th century. David Jordan, a lecturer at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in Wiltshire, England, has produced an engrossing page-turner detailing the progress of the war, both in Europe and the Pacific. The vast array of photos is both exciting and informative. He even includes a stand-alone timeline poster. Imagine, the history of the war on your wall. Thunder Bay Press, 224 pages, $21.95 Amazon.com Price: $11.66 ).

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