An eye-opening exploration of how tradition and star-studded dreams shape love in modern India.
Intimate portraits of three marriages reveal family life in Mumbai.
Flock, a reporter for PBS NewsHour and former investigative reporter for Forbes India Magazine, makes her literary debut with an absorbing, candid look at three couples as they confront life in a changing India. While families prefer marriages to be arranged, young couples imbibe notions about love and romance from Bollywood movies. One young husband worries about not having a car: in films, he reflects, “men took women out on long drives in their car or on their motorcycle. It was how they fell in love.” Parents hire matchmakers, while single men and women try to find true love from dating sites and events. Fathers exert draconian control over daughters who yearn for autonomy. Flock lived with the couples for a while, observing their interactions; her journalistic style pays off. One couple shared their online chats with her; others kept in touch by email for nearly a decade. Each marriage faced problems. For Veer and Maya, their relationship was fraught from the beginning because Veer had been in love with another woman, who rejected him; and Maya, frustrated and volatile—and, it emerges, a victim of sexual abuse as a child—had attempted suicide. Her restlessness and Veer’s obsession with work strained their marriage. Maya considered divorce, but her reasons for unhappiness did not come under the stipulations of the Hindu Marriage Act; instead, she has affairs. Shahzad and Sabeena faced Shahzad’s sterility; in a culture that expects marriages to grow into families, Shahzad felt desperate to prove his manhood, consulting medical doctors as well as fortunetellers, herbalists, and quacks. Ashok and Parvati, both Tamil Brahmins, felt pressure to marry within their caste and religion, although Parvati had been in love with a Christian man, inciting her father’s rage, and Ashok had not yet found a companion. Brought together by a matchmaking site and affirmed by astrologers, they agreed to marry after meeting in person only briefly.
An eye-opening exploration of how tradition and star-studded dreams shape love in modern India.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-245648-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
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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