A well-written, personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our lives.
A personal story bound up in six centuries of Black European history.
After his stepfather’s death, Arena returned from his birthplace and home in Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa, to Portugal, the country where he grew up. Chronicling his explorations of Lisbon and the surrounding landscape, the author weaves among the arcs of his personal history and the histories of Black lives at the heart of European empire. Arena, a journalist by trade, is particularly interested in people whose “life stories were rescued from oblivion by the miracles of literature—eventually by biographers, but initially through works of family fiction.” He pursues the family history of his friend Leopoldina, whose enslaved ancestors rebelled against their oppression in Portugal. Alongside such intimate sagas are brief biographies of Black people who, despite rigid and racist social structures, rose to great prominence in the white Western world. These stories often draw on the unlikely immortality of literary success; their subjects include Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the great French novelist; and Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, confidante of Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather. Arena also has a gift for lyrical object history. The book opens with a close reading of a technically “mediocre” but informationally rich 16th-century painting of a fountain where Lisbon’s African population—enslaved and free alike—gathered. Later, visiting the site of the fountain, Arena reflects on the continuities of history and place, the relation of the scene around him to the one depicted in paint: “My ancestral trajectory was both personal and typical—one more family of Cape Verdean immigrants—and how, in some abstract way, perhaps through that sense of melancholy we Portuguese speakers call saudade, my own journey was connected to that first voyage, in 1444, when 235 Africans were brought to Portugal with shackles on their feet.”
A well-written, personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our lives.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781951213527
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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