Raw and compelling; a story well told of a vital and varied life in a war-torn region.
The British-born founder of an international nonprofit organization traces his activism in this debut memoir.
Wilson may have been born in Britain, but it wasn’t long before he had an urge to discover the world. At age 13, he was sent to live at a school where he became a social outcast with the nickname “Commie Wilson.” One of his only two school friends mentioned that his father lived in Argentina, so at 17, Wilson announced to his parents that he would be leaving to work there. Coming of age in South America (as well as losing his virginity), the peripatetic Wilson then returned to England only to depart again for a 10-day holiday on an island in Yugoslavia, where he met Renata, the girl who would become his wife. The author had his initial real awakening to the harsh reality of the world when he first visited Zagreb to meet Renata’s family. In 1968, when he returned to Zagreb to marry, it was a time of war in Yugoslavia. Wilson’s connection to that country continued; he ended up representing a Croatian painter and traveling back from London to Zagreb, where he was directly exposed to the Bosnian War. This turning point in Wilson’s life led to the co-founding of War Child, a nonprofit organization originally started to call attention to the plight of Bosnian children. It also ended his first marriage because “I preferred to be in a war zone rather than be at home with her.” Through a series of high-profile, celebrity-laden fundraisers, War Child continued to achieve remarkable success, but it was a charity concert by Luciano Pavarotti that indirectly led to Wilson’s next position as director of the Mostar Music Centre in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina. With a keen eye for detail, the author recounts his diverse experiences in the embattled region, including encountering Bosnian refugees (“I felt fear for myself and sorrow for the plight of these people….They could have been refugees in any war: suitcases tied with string, a live animal if they were lucky”). His shared heart-wrenching observations are clearly a highlight of this richly textured, moving work. The book ends with a different voice in a chapter by Wilson’s second wife, Anne, who writes poignantly about her first trip to Mostar.
Raw and compelling; a story well told of a vital and varied life in a war-torn region.Pub Date: May 5, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Unbound Digital
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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