A hip and lively narrative of human-rights activism in Burma. Mirante spent the 1970's in San Francisco, ``dressed in black velvet and antelope leather,'' slinking ``through dangerous neighborhoods with a legendary vampire guitarist.'' She also painted, and in the early 80's started spending longer and longer periods in Asia, where she went to refine her artistic technique. Mirante ended up hanging out with rebel Burmese tribes on the border between Burma and Thailand, making friends with some vivid characters, like Prince George, an Anglophilic rebel leader who habitually breakfasted on Mekong whiskey, and Spin, a photojournalist and drifter through Asia. After a period of increasing outrage at the regime of Burmese dictator Ne Win and at the US for supplying defoliant for use against the rebels, Mirante founded Project Maje, devoted to publicizing the plight of the ten tribes in the area—a plight that rarely found its way into the media until the widespread upheavals of 1988. Jailed twice, once for an illegal border-crossing and once without being charged, Mirante is now persona non grata in Thailand. Here, her eye for setting a scene and her gift for evoking rebels, brigands, hippies, and sinister security forces pull the reader into a Terry and the Pirates world where those who tread quickly get ``burnt out by wars, companion fatigue, survivor guilt, hepatitis.'' A dramatic but caring book in which Mirante's blithe tone doesn't disguise her earnest concern for the worsening conditions faced by the Burmese hill tribes.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1457-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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