A worthwhile work that will please armchair travelers and historians.
A lively journey down the Ganges River via off-the-beaten-path destinations and historical moments.
Journalist Black (Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone, 2012, etc.) traveled from the source of the Ganges to its mouth in a series of short trips. The river is known as “Ma Ganga,” a mother goddess, and it feeds half a billion people by irrigating rice and wheat fields. The author’s fascination with the Ganges began at age 11 when he saw a woodcut of a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre on the banks of the river in a 19th-century book he bought from a junk shop. In his quest to discover the modern Ganges and its historical importance, he started in New Delhi before proceeding to the Gangotri Glacier, one of the largest in the Himalayas, and the Rajasthan Desert. From cold, bare lodgings to tourist-trap hotels, Black experienced the extremes of Indian hospitality, and he even learned Hindi insults as a result of some scary rides. Interviews and dialogue enhance the vivid scenes, and the author doesn’t limit himself to high-profile destinations Western tourists are likely to see. His stops included a temple on the border with Tibet and a rickshaw graveyard in Dhaka, and he observed a cremation and joined in the search for a problem tiger. Throughout, Black shows that he is aware of the Western travelers who went before, everyone from Sir Edmund Hilary and Mark Twain to the Beatles and Allen Ginsberg. The most poignant moments come when past and present, or various cultures, meet in surprising ways—e.g., relics of the 1857 Indian Rebellion appear alongside Muslim icons and a squatter colony. Black powerfully reveals the contradictions of modern South Asia by way of this body of water, “a seducer, a magnetic field” that is both “place of worship and…open sewer.”
A worthwhile work that will please armchair travelers and historians.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-05735-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
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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