Worthy of comparison to Roger Cohen’s Hearts Grown Brutal (1998), Eric Carlson’s I Remember Julia (1998), and other fine...
A young human-rights worker explicates a half-century’s violence and terror in a small Central American nation.
Wilkinson served on the “truth commission” whose report on Guatemala “prompted Bill Clinton to do something that would have been unthinkable for a US president during the cold war: issue a formal apology for the US government’s past support of abusive regimes in Guatemala.” Those regimes carried on a war that had been fought for generations by the European colonial powers against the native Maya population. The Indians were merely striving for better working and living conditions, but the government created by a US-backed coup in 1954 was able to frame this long war in the context of an anticommunist crusade. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were virtually enslaved on coffee plantations supplying the brewpots of America and Europe, while many others were murdered by death squads and the army. Seeking witnesses to these events among people understandably reluctant to talk to a white man, Wilkinson eventually turned up the sad stories and fascinating details that pepper his narrative history: the tales of disappeared villages and massacred Indians who did not “cooperate actively in the progress of civilization,” of desperate relatives seeking some sort of communion with the dead through the offices of spiritualists and priests; the morose confessions of a former army officer, trained by American instructors to “think in the political terms of democracy versus totalitarianism, United States versus Soviet Union,” who participated in the bloodshed before dedicating himself to political reform; portraits of plantation owners and workers locked in a cycle of dependence and patronage that must be undone before things can change at all, much less for the better.
Worthy of comparison to Roger Cohen’s Hearts Grown Brutal (1998), Eric Carlson’s I Remember Julia (1998), and other fine studies of savage wars in little-known places.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-22139-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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