Thoughtful, sometimes mournful essays on the state of the world, with little good news in sight.
Travels in antique—and heavily armed—lands, many of them on a collision course with the American Empire.
Calcutta-born novelist (The Hungry Tide, 2005, etc.) and journalist Ghosh opens this collection of essays with a report that will seem all too immediate: In the wake of last year’s Christmas tsunami, he arrives in the Andaman Islands to discover that the place, a sort of virtual museum of tourist-oriented primitivism, has been devastated, of course—but also that no one was prepared, and no one in charge has the least idea of what to do next. As government officials make themselves scarce, stand-ins are pressed into service: priests, scientists, anyone who can write. “It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property while leaving nature largely unharmed,” Ghosh writes. The author’s meditation on the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center may be one of the most sensitive in the literature, as he wrestles to reconcile enormity with his credo “that nothing human should be alien to me.” At the center of the book is its most memorable piece, a tour of the front lines in a wildly alien place, a vast glacier in the Himalayas over which Pakistani and Indian troops have been warring for years. Even though it has “no strategic, military, or economic value whatsoever,” Siachen Glacier has become its own cause; returning from duty on the ice, a reputedly sane Indian officer proposes that it be melted with a nuclear device so as to flood Pakistan, sweep its inhabitants away and allow his troops to go home. Everywhere Ghosh travels he finds confusion and conflict—even, sad to say, in the republic of books that marks his graceful reminiscence of youth in Calcutta, “an oddly bookish city.”
Thoughtful, sometimes mournful essays on the state of the world, with little good news in sight.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-37806-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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 Yorkerstaff 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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