With eloquent anger and careful research, Roy expertly captures the faces of both folly and courage. (Author tour)
In her first non-fiction work, award-winning novelist Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997) reveals the authoritarian paternalism of the Indian state that lies behind a mask of benevolence.
To Roy, India with all its fissures and factions is a fictitious nation created by the state to legitimate itself. Once the fiction is in place, the state can justify its actions in the name of the common good no matter how injurious these actions may be in reality. So it is with India’s undertaking of massive dam and irrigation projects and its successful detonation of a nuclear bomb, the subjects respectively of the two essays in this volume. The second essay offers the bomb as an example of state arrogance and foolishness whose potential consequences are obvious and terrible. In the first essay, which will likely be more revelatory to American audiences, Roy focuses her attention on the Naramada valley, home to 325,000 people, mostly of minority tribes. When the building of a series of huge dams is completed the valley will flood and all will lose their homes, becoming in a bloodless acronym, PAPs: Project Affected Persons. A whole way of life will end as PAPs are relocated to dismal camps or end up in urban slums. Roy clearly and bitingly demonstrates, however, that it is not at all clear the project will do what it is supposed to do. It may use more electricity than it generates or destroy more farmland than it creates, and those who are to receive drinking water may never have a drop reach them. The Indian state goes on its haughty way, blithely dismissing all doubts. Yet the people of the Naramada valley have organized and resisted, and though the outcome is unclear, this resistance is what inspires Roy. This resistance, not the state, is the home of Indian democracy, and she urges the struggle to continue (royalties from the book are going to the organization heading this struggle).
With eloquent anger and careful research, Roy expertly captures the faces of both folly and courage. (Author tour)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-75614-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Modern Library
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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