Though chilling, this unfocused narrative fails to illuminate the purported relationship between Nelson Rockefeller, missionaries in South America, and the modern genocide of Amazonian Indians. Colby (DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, not reviewed) and investigative journalist Dennett detail Rockefeller's rise to power (both unofficial power through his family's oil interests and official power in government); this is coupled with a description of William Cameron Townsend's creation of Wycliffe Bible Translators, a network of evangelical missionaries working under the auspices of the elusively named Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). The authors describe the links between the SIL's in-depth knowledge of indigenous people and their languages and the creation of a sophisticated communications and intelligence-gathering network serving the business interests of multinational corporations and the anti-communist policies of the US government. Also important is the documenting of Rockefeller's powerful role in the development of US policy toward Latin America and his early vision of a ``peaceful conquest of the world'' through economic aid and political manipulation. But beyond this, it is unclear how Rockefeller fits into the devastation of the Amazon's indigenous people. In seeking to document global changes of epic proportions, Colby and Dennett present themselves with an impossible descriptive task, with virtually no opportunity to either analyze their voluminous historical data or focus on any one of the many interesting issues they raise. Only three-quarters of the way into the book do the authors actually discuss the conquest of the Amazon, and the description of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Amazonian Indians is insubstantial; at one point, the authors simply list a series of decimated Indian groups, providing the dates of SIL ``occupation.'' Only in the case of the deaths of striking Bolivian miners is it clear who is responsible and why. This falls considerably short of its potential as a major study of the tragic destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous people. (24 pages b&w photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016764-5
Page Count: 704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
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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