A rich survey of just a few of the U.S.’s methods of communication.
Author and photographer Van Sise offers a rich profile of the many languages that are found in the United States.
The author offers brief essays on a range of tongues, including Mohawk, creole dialects such as Alaskan Russian and Afro-Seminole, and Judaeo-Spanish from New York City. That language, for example, was brought to the United States by “Spanish Jews expelled from Iberia [who] fled…to North Africa, Greece, Italy, Turkey, and the Balkans, bringing the medieval Spanish language with them and absorbing, depending on destination, elements of Arabic, Berber, Greek, Italian, Turkish, and Slavic languages.” Numerous others have similarly complex origins, and many are in danger of extinction as their number of native speakers dwindles. Cahuilla, for instance, is an Uto-Aztecan language that’s indigenous to the Palm Springs, California, area and currently has just a few “first-language” speakers—that is, people who were taught Cahuilla first, before English or other languages. Deg Xinag, an Athabaskan language found in only a few villages in Alaska, has only two remaining native speakers. Most of the examples here have Indigenous origins; the Mohawk language is currently experiencing a resurgence, and the Kickapoo Nation was able to shield their traditions by fleeing their traditional homeland around the Great Lakes to Mexico. Other languages are thriving; Plains Sign Language, for example, was featured during the 2023 Super Bowl broadcast. Accompanying many of the short essays are Van Sise’s beautiful photographs showcasing people who speak the languages, such as U.S. Army Maj. Warren Queton, one of 20 Kiowa speakers; he’s shown on a U.S. Army base in uniform, wearing his grandfather’s headdress and taking joy in showing what’s most important to him. In another image, Ojibwe-speaking Alaskan Stella Hunter, wearing a ribbon skirt, observes the northern lights. Overall, the book does a great job of contextualizing the common tragedy of language loss, and it offers an informative sampling of those that still exist.
A rich survey of just a few of the U.S.’s methods of communication.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780764368141
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Schiffer
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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