An uneven collection—never just travel writing or political analysis—that nonetheless seems to map new territory of its own.
Essays on identity, place, and the pervasiveness of the past in the present, by a global literary citizen.
Hariharan (In Times of Siege, 2003, etc.) employs abundant creative imagination as she conjures the centuries past that have shaped the present in which she finds herself. At some times and places, she envisions fields of battle, at others there are battles between lovers. Her aim is to come to terms not only with a place, but with herself in that place, a self who has never been defined by any one place: “I have lived all my life in a city, but if someone asked me, quite simply, ‘So which city are you from?’ I wouldn’t be able to answer. Or I would have too many answers….Or I could say: Anycity, composite city of visible cities, remembered cities, imagined cities.” Because of all the globe-trotting that has preceded the concluding title essay, it actually comes as a surprise to learn that she has “lived in Delhi for thirty years now.” If these essays are all over the map, they also cover a lot of thematic territory as well. Perhaps the most powerful essay is “Looking for a nation, looking at a nation,” occasioned by the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Algeria’s independence from France and a conference celebrating the revolutionary spirit of Franz Fanon. Hariharan quotes the final line of his first book: “My final prayer: oh my body, make me always a man who asks questions.” The author also asks questions, about the roles of women in various societies, about the dispossessed, and about power and the powerless. The most provocative essay, particularly for pro-Israel Americans, is “Seeing Palestine,” which, writes Hariharan, “has depended on what the beholders are looking for: on the burden of their beliefs, the depth of their wishes to map the place afresh, the sweep of their imagination.”
An uneven collection—never just travel writing or political analysis—that nonetheless seems to map new territory of its own.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63206-061-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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