A fierce and knowledgeable examination of Bengal’s oppression.
A history book focuses on Bengal’s treatment at the hands of the British.
“The British Empire came to India to trade but stayed to rule, realizing that establishing military control was the only way in order to enhance their profits,” writes Chowdhury at the outset of his searing study of British rule in India. “All was done for only British interests, entailing profits that went to British coffers, not for the blood, sweat and energy of a single Indian.” In this volume, he deals with the modern-era history of the region bordered by the Himalayas in the North and the Bay of Bengal in the South: the Indian province of West Bengal and the independent country of Bangladesh. He points out that not only is West Bengal a strategic trading hub for Southeast Asia, producing millions of tons of rice every year, but also that the Bengal area was equally lavish and productive prior to the arrival of direct British imperial control in the 19th century—after which largely came exploitation and destruction. In this passionate book, Chowdhury skillfully takes readers through some of the most famous events of this colonial occupation, including the Amritsar Massacre in April 1919, in which more than a thousand people were killed or injured, and the 1942-44 Bengal famine, which he sees as a direct result of British rule under Winston Churchill. “British colonial government printed large amounts of money for military expenditure,” the author writes, which caused the price of rice in Bengal to rise by 300%. “Since wages did not rise, ordinary people were pushed even deeper into poverty.” In textured, urgent, and erudite prose, Chowdhury expertly covers various events, including those in the present day, in order to show how a “2.0 version of the British colonial project” has been at work in far more recent times, attempting to revive a “divide and rule” policy so that “outside players can pounce with their economic aid and investment.”
A fierce and knowledgeable examination of Bengal’s oppression.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798895469354
Page Count: 545
Publisher: Fabrezan & Phillipe
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorkerstaff 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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