In this slim yet fascinating foray into the nature of self-identity, Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez adopts the voice and tells the real-life tale of a banished film director who returned incognito to his native Chile to film life under the repressive Pinochet regime. Exiled from Chile in 1974 for his allegiance to the Marxist ideals of murdered Chilean President Allende, Littin, director of the esteemed El Chacal de Nahualtoro, sneaked into Chile in early 1985 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. There, directing three legitimate European film crews as well as six crews from the Chilean resistance, he penetrated as far as Pinochet's private office. "To pin a great long donkey's tail on Pinochet" was, in large part, Littin's aim in this dangerous venture, but Garcia Marquez's rendering of the story, an elegant editing of 18 hours of talk between writer and filmmaker, focuses more on the disorientation of adopting a new identity, and on Littin's narrow escapes from detection, than on the political or moral aspects of the director's feat. Littin's transformation is radical: not only body changes such as tweezed eyebrows and scalp, weight loss, and glasses, but a major shift in behavior as well: "I had to learn to laugh differently, to walk slowly, and to use my hands for emphasis when I spoke." But as he travels through Chile meeting old family and pals who fail to recognize him—including his own mother!—he suffers increasingly under his role, at times endangering his mission through lapses or willful revolt. So with the police catching on, only hours behind him, it's with great relief that a confused Littin at last boards a plane to Mexico, leaving behind the weight of another's self. Minor Garcia Marquez, but still superbly crafted and worth exploring.
Pub Date: June 1, 1987
ISBN: 1590173406
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1987
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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