An indelible retelling—implacable, elegiac, simmering with moral outrage—of the stoning to death of an Iranian woman falsely accused of adultery. In the fall of 1986, Sahebjam—an Iranian journalist who'd been kidnapped and beaten by pro-Khomeini terrorists in Paris- -sneaked into Iran to investigate conditions. In the isolated village of Kupayeh, an old woman beckoned him aside and told him that, two weeks before, her niece, Soraya M., had been executed by stoning. Here, after Sahebjam sets forth these facts, he tells Soraya's story, based on his interviews with the aunt, the village's mayor, and others: Though a faithful wife and devoted mother, Soraya, 35, was a lonely woman who kept to herself, in part because of her bad marriage to one Ghorban-Ali, a low-life who, aligning himself with Khomeini, had risen to power in the village even as he abused his wife, visited prostitutes, and carried on with a younger woman. Meanwhile, one Hassan Lajevardi, pederast and felon, had murdered a magistrate in a nearby city and fled to Kupayeh, where he took control of the town by posing as a mullah. But despite his clerical garb, Lajevardi made a pass at Soraya, which she rejected. Soon, Ghorban-Ali—who wished his wife gone— and the incensed Lajevardi began to plot. Roping other villagers into their scheme, they accused Soraya of adultery; as dictated by custom, the men of the village met and voted a sentence: death by stoning. As the villagers circled around her, Soraya was buried up to her shoulders. Her father threw the first stone; more flew until she died. The village women then laid Soraya at a nearby river, where, the following day, her aunt found the body savaged by dogs. She washed and buried the bones, and ``then, and only then, did she pray and burst into tears.'' An unforgettable indictment, brilliantly written and translated, of man's inhumanity to woman—and of tyranny disguised as righteousness.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-233-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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