A brief but edifying remembrance that’s filled with poignant personal reflection, as well as moments of international...
A personal memoir about a man’s difficult relationship with his father, his search for enlightenment, and his obsession with tennis.
Debut author Cox’s dad worked in the U.S. Foreign Service, and as a result, he spent his own childhood traveling the globe. He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1960, and he and his family went on to live in various places on several different continents; in 1965, for instance, they were evacuated from Saigon, Vietnam, as war arrived. Following in his father’s footsteps, the author became an avid tennis enthusiast, and even took lessons from a student of Pancho Gonzalez, one of the world’s best tennis players, while living in Laos. Cox relates his turbulent relationship with his father, whom he characterizes as cold and sometimes emotionally abusive; still, the author compulsively practiced his tennis game to win his dad’s praise—and to finally beat him on the court. In fact, he trained so tenaciously that the wear and tear on his body forced him to take an extended hiatus from the sport. Eventually, his mother remarried, and Cox joined his sister in the Pacific Northwest to go to college, where he again played tennis. There, he also became intensely interested in Eastern philosophy, meditation, and yoga; he trained at a holistic yoga center before accepting the life-changing mentorship of Dennis Adams, a self-proclaimed psychic. Throughout this memoir, Cox writes movingly of his lifelong search for inner peace, as well as about his uphill battle to free himself from the grim influence of a mercurial parent. He also arrestingly describes his own spiritual experiences on the path to enlightenment: “it felt like I was connected to everything that existed through small streams of energy or light. This web of light was a soft, conscious energy; it flowed between me and everything else in existence.” In the end, Cox delivers an intriguing life story that depicts Eastern spiritual practice as a tonic to Western culture.
A brief but edifying remembrance that’s filled with poignant personal reflection, as well as moments of international adventure.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
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 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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