Although some of these pieces are on the thin side, this is a fitting final flourish for a literary giant of the Latin...
The final work of the esteemed Uruguayan journalist and social critic.
“Writing is tiring, but it consoles me.” These are among the last words written by Galeano (Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, 2015, etc.). They’re from “A Few Things About the Author,” one of the more than 200 stories, ruminations, reflections, and proverbs, most just one short page, collected and published shortly before he died in 2015. Fried, his longtime translator, writes in a note that the author possessed a “habitual optimism about the human condition” and an “eternal pessimism about the course of civilization.” For legions of soccer fanatics around the world, Galeano was known for his magisterial Soccer in Sun and Shadow, about which he writes, “I wanted to help fans of reading lose their fear of soccer, and fans of soccer lose their fear of books.” For many others, he was known for his unrelenting and indefatigable leftist critiques of historical colonialism in the Americas, dictatorships, political evils, and social injustice “in the eternal battle of indignation against indignity.” These pieces, more rueful and reflective and less strident than his earlier writings, still reveal a man who will not sit by when he witnesses people “turning the world into an immense lunatic asylum and an overcrowded cemetery.” He skewers dictator Augusto Pinochet: the “man who burned the most books and read the fewest was the owner of the heftiest library in Chile.” For Francisco Franco, “killing was a pleasure and it mattered little if the cadaver was a crow, a duck, or a Republican.” Galeano could also be witty and humorous. When the stolen Mona Lisa turned up two years later in 1913, “it was evident that the experience had not diminished the most mysterious smile in the world; being stolen only enhanced its prestige.”
Although some of these pieces are on the thin side, this is a fitting final flourish for a literary giant of the Latin American left.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56858-990-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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