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 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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