Paris raises uncomfortable questions of enormous importance, but the complexities of the situations often demand far more...
A Canadian writer visits places with dark histories to find what people know and feel about them.
“I could imagine nothing more compelling,” writes Paris (The End of Days, not reviewed), “than to hunt down the ways that the past is managed to suit the perception of our present needs.” And “hunt down” she does—in ways ranging from enlightening to superficial. She begins with WWII, visiting Germany and interviewing a variety of people, including Martin Bormann Jr. (now a Catholic priest). She notes that Germany not only acknowledges its wartime atrocities but requires their study in the school curriculum. In France, she views some of the trial of Maurice Papon, a former Nazi collaborator during the occupation, and again interviews a wide range of people (including a group of high school students who are skeptical about the French myth of a pervasive resistance movement during the war). In Japan, the author finds an unwillingness to examine war crimes committed by the Japanese (e.g., the 1937 Rape of Nanking) rather than those committed against them (such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki). In the shallowest section of her survey, Paris goes to the US and considers the lingering legacies of slavery. Here, she points out the obvious, cites the well-known (e.g., de Tocqueville’s prescience), and regrets that Congress declined to issue an apology for slavery. In South Africa, her interviews range from the guy who sat next to her on the plane to Desmond Tutu. Included is a riveting account of a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Lusikisiki. She also tells the story of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, dives into the murky historical waters of the Balkans, and discusses the history of prosecutions for war crimes.
Paris raises uncomfortable questions of enormous importance, but the complexities of the situations often demand far more analysis than she offers—or appears capable of offering).Pub Date: June 5, 2001
ISBN: 1-58234-156-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
