A disappointing account that insists on raising expectations, only to dash them at every opportunity.
Snapshots of western Africa, taken from the journal of an Italian writer on tour.
The opening of Celati’s travelogue sets the tone: “Yesterday, arriving at the airport in Bamako, at 2:30 in the morning, I stopped understanding what was happening.” Accompanying a filmmaker who was trying to produce a documentary on African medicine, Celati is the consummate hanger-on, blending the facts of his trip with lackadaisical observations. He’s an unapologetic tourist, a refreshing but sometimes enervating stance that leaves him free to breezily describe his surroundings—the rough architecture and cagey African townspeople, for instance—but can be chilling when applied with the same insouciance to an account of ten-year-old prostitutes. The documentary film all but falls apart, and Celati spends much time lounging under trees writing in Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania, paying as much attention to himself as the world around him. He manages to befriend a woman in Senegal, and his ordinarily bemused attitude gives way to a vaguely sexual tone; for the first time, we find him treating a native African like a regular person. The woman works at a law office and lives a social life that reminds the author of the coming and goings of a piazza (with cousins, French in-laws, and the like), a picture that begins to render the woman familiar to him—perhaps too much so. She comes to resemble an Italian more than anything else—and the author seems, in fact, to be papering over her real personality with a superimposed one. Perhaps this rendering attests to the author’s ability to treat her as an equal. More likely it’s a sign of his cultural blindness. The short entries, which range from three to one per page, make for quick reading, but they also create a narrative that only scratches the surface of a rich experience. Celati clearly intends to write like a tourist, a nomad, ranging over subjects, but his strategy doesn’t necessarily work.
A disappointing account that insists on raising expectations, only to dash them at every opportunity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-226-09955-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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