A rattling chronicle of violence and terror.
A supremely discomfiting piece of literary journalism of the effects of the Tokyo subway gas attacks, all the more disturbing on account of its subdued voice, from Japanese novelist Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart, p. 75, etc.).
Recreated here, through 60 powerfully observed interviews, are the deadly Tokyo subway attacks of March 20, 1995, that were launched by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. All the debacle’s surreal and horrific qualities rush to the fore, though Murakami keeps the tone under control. By keeping the atmosphere immediate, the author allows the irreducible humanity of each person to emerge. There are people who were immediately involved in the gas attack and they speak of the pains in their chest, how their breathing seemed to simply stop and foam poured from their mouths, how blindness overcame them. There is still an enormous amount of shock touching their lives, and tremendous anger: “What am I supposed to do with all this rage?” fumes one survivor. Then there is what Murakami calls the “double violence” of a number of souls. Sarin, the gas deployed, is some 26 times more deadly than cyanide and it leaves as many psychological scars as it does physical ailments in the survivors. These mental scars have resulted in some victims losing their jobs. An enthralling section gives Murakami a chance to dig around in why he had felt dread when confronted with Aum members before the attack, and how their members (former and current Aum members are also interviewed) might well harbor “doubts about the inhumane, utilitarian grist mill of capitalism and the social system in which their own essence and efforts—even their own reasons for being—would be fruitlessly ground down.”
A rattling chronicle of violence and terror.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-72580-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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