A compelling but scattered study that requires a patient, highly engaged reader.
A complicated, ambitious survey of the Zanzibar dynasty and the scourge of the Arab slave trade in Africa.
In this teeming cultural history, former New York Daily News travel writer Bird (A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan, 2004, etc.) focuses on two narrative threads: the Sultanate of Oman’s pursuit of the lucrative, slave-heavy clove trade in the 19th century, and the extraordinary life of Zanzibari ruler Seyyid Said bin Al Busaid’s daughter Salme, who left her harem home and eloped with a German businessman in 1866. Oman became an independent dynasty practicing a breakaway form of Islam that called for a return to its original values. Enriched by mercantile trading with the East, its port of Muscat thrived as a hub of the slave trade from Zanzibar and East Africa. The Arabs had been dealing in slaves 1,000 years before the European transatlantic trade, although the author argues that the Arab trade was much smaller—7,200 slaves transported per year until the number “jumped exponentially” by the mid-1700s—and more humane, due to the Koran’s more egalitarian tenets. The Sultanate of Oman managed to expel invasions by the Persians, Portuguese, Napoleon and the Wahhabi. Eventually Said settled permanently on the clove-rich island of Zanzibar, where his spirited, self-educated daughter Salme grew up in perfumed luxury. Bird is fascinated by the sparks and misunderstandings that flew from occasional East-West encounters, dwelling in particular on visits to Zanzibar by such 19th-century explorers as Richard Francis Burton, Henry Morton Stanley and anti-slave trade crusader David Livingstone. Consequently, there are many narratives that do not intersect, and each chapter could serve as a jumping-off point for a fascinating work of its own.
A compelling but scattered study that requires a patient, highly engaged reader.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-46940-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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 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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