Illuminates our stunning capacity to survive, to tend to one another, to hope. And to deceive, crush and steal from those...
A journalist intercuts the stories of four families from the Thai coastal village of Nam Khem that lost nearly 5,000 inhabitants in the December 2004 tsunami.
Krauss (On the Line, 2004, etc.) was in Thailand at the end of 2004 working on a book about Thai martial arts. But he quickly became involved in the relief effort when the tsunami struck. Although he delays revealing his involvement until the very end, it is evident in his richly detailed text that he had extraordinary access to some remarkable people. He employs the third person but steadfastly maintains the points-of-view of the subjects. He begins with descriptions of Nam Khem, a tin-mining town which, he notes, was in some ways similar to those lawless American camps of the 19th-century (e.g., Deadwood). He tells how his subjects came to the town, how they met one another, fell in love (in some cases) and struggled to build lives as fishermen, divers, boxers, waitresses. Most had very little but family and determination. The author then tells how the tsunami formed and how the waves arrived. Readers may be surprised to learn that more than one hit the Thai beaches; the waves came in a series. The most wrenching moments of this astonishing account involve the desperate struggles of Krauss’s subjects to survive, and then to find their loved ones. Each family suffers grievous loss. The author occasionally takes us away from his principals—we see medical personnel coping with hundreds, then thousands, of injured; we watch policemen attempt to organize and restore order. And, sadly, we watch the human sharks circling. Looters. Swindlers. Corrupt officials skimming supplies and cash. Thugs stealing land. A nasty unnamed Christian organization arrives but withholds help until the (mostly Buddhist) people embrace Jesus; some of the desperate do.
Illuminates our stunning capacity to survive, to tend to one another, to hope. And to deceive, crush and steal from those weaker than ourselves.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2005
ISBN: 1-59486-378-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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