Reconciliation is an increasingly important process in nations once torn by fratricide. Rice’s important book serves as an...
From longtime African affairs journalist Rice, a provocative story of war, death and the quest for justice in the wake of Idi Amin’s ruinous reign in Uganda.
Amin, writes the author, was beloved there, at least for a time. In British service, he was “a skilled tracker and an excellent shot, though he was a bit trigger-happy.” As a ruler, having engineered a coup against his left-leaning predecessor and passed muster as a Cold War ally of the Western powers, he was seen as someone who could be reasoned with. Not so. Amin’s lieutenants busily eliminated servants of the former administration and others suspected of being disloyal to the regime, which would become internationally infamous for its role in the hijacking of an Israeli airliner. One victim of the bloodletting was a county chief named Eliphaz Laki, who disappeared in 1972. In 1979, Amin’s army, a haphazard lot of brigands, disintegrated after an ill-advised invasion of neighboring Tanzania. Amin fled into Saudi Arabian exile, after which many Ugandans took the view that it might be just as well to forget the past. Yet in 1986 a new leader came to power, Yoweri Museveni, and one of his first official acts was to establish a commission of inquiry about the crimes of the Amin regime, telling Ugandans that “they could begin to mend their nation just by speaking the truth.” Helped by Laki’s son, investigators determined that the murderers included Amin’s chief of staff, as well as two soldiers, all of whom were brought to trial. Rice observes that, whereas most murder trials in Uganda’s legal system took only a week or so to be settled, that of the senior official took more than a year, complicated by both the quality of the evidence and, it seems, a persistent refusal to fully engage the past.
Reconciliation is an increasingly important process in nations once torn by fratricide. Rice’s important book serves as an urgent case study, complete with a surprising outcome.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7965-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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 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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