A bit dense at times, but ultimately revelatory.
Occasional pieces on his native land by Nobelist Sen (Rationality and Freedom, 1999, etc.).
Even the rather commonplace observation that India is incredibly diverse seems fresh when elucidated by the author in an essay devoted to the country’s many calendars: the Buddha Nirvana, the Saka, the Kollam, etc. How do all these different groups, with their different calendars, coexist? Over the centuries, states Sen, India has developed a robust “argumentative tradition,” a practice of rational discourse. This tradition, he declares, is valuable in a society pursuing democracy, yet it has been neglected in recent years. Religionists in India have their own reasons for promoting a particular piece of its eclectic history, and Westerners too often reduce the subcontinent to a place they can visit when they need a shot of mysticism. Sen denounces—and indeed disproves—the bigoted view that reason is essentially Western or European. India, he makes plain, has a long tradition of civil debate, of secular thought and of contributions to math and science. The opening essays are broadly historical, but Sen moves on to issues of greater relevance and urgency. In “India and the Bomb,” he untangles two distinct issues: the world’s stance on weapons, which “needs a change and in particular requires an effective and rapid disarmament”; and India and Pakistan’s “nuclear adventures,” which he believes cannot be rationalized by pointing out that many other countries have nuclear weapons. Sen urges India to practice “nuclear abstinence” and to press for disarmament around the globe. In another piece, he limns class division in contemporary India and suggests that some of the recent policies designed to ameliorate this rift have actually calcified it. In an essay on gender, Sen urges India to appreciate how much women can do to uplift a society. Collections of previously published essays often prove uneven; this one is remarkably uniform in theme and quality.
A bit dense at times, but ultimately revelatory.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-10583-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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