Travel fans will enjoy Montgomery's colorful, evocative narrative, but will want to take his survey of South Seas folklore...
Following in the footsteps of his missionary great-grandfather, Montgomery journeys to the remote South Seas in search of pagan rituals, native magic and the story of an early martyr.
What he finds is hardly idyllic. Leapfrogging among south Pacific archipelagos—the Solomons, the Reef Islands and Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides)—Montgomery encounters natives still struggling to escape ignorance, poverty and civil war. True, the cannibalism once practiced in Melanesia is gone. But instead of the lush paradise one would expect, Montgomery discovers that most of these remote island outposts have hardly progressed since American GIs moved on following World War II. With no jobs and no prospects, natives seem to spend most of their days drinking kava or chewing betel nuts, two opiates derived from local plants. The author sets out in search of the pagan rituals that are still being practiced there despite a century of evangelical work by Anglicans, Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics and others. Montgomery finds that native magic, or “kastom,” still holds great power among the locals, but the supposed “shaman,” or holy men, seem generally to be drug-hazed con artists whose boasts of magic powers and native myths would make most grade-schoolers skeptical. Not Montgomery: Indeed, the author approaches his subject with the conviction of a wide-eyed believer, even after one shaman after the other declines his requests for a demonstration of magic powers. Montgomery is a talented writer, and this tour is delivered in vivid, precise prose, but his failure to ask hard questions and his tendency to strain for drama where it doesn't exist mar what should have been a more clear-eyed travelogue.
Travel fans will enjoy Montgomery's colorful, evocative narrative, but will want to take his survey of South Seas folklore with more than a few grains of salt.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-076516-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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
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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