charts; 32 pages b&w photos) (First printing of 25,000)
A superb one-volume history of a land that defies reduction into simple narrative.
Many overviews of Indian history offer a few cursory opening chapters that take the reader from Mohenjo-daro to the arrival of the Europeans, when, in an all too common view, the historical materials become reliable. Keay (Empire’s End, 1997, etc.) reverses this formula, devoting most of his space to the vast span of Indian history before the European arrival. There is no shortage of good documentation for these thousands of years, Keay suggests, but there has been a shortage of scholars who know how to use it. Opening with a clear discussion of what is known of the ancient Harappan peoples, Keay proceeds to offer a careful account of the much-misunderstood and politically misused Aryans, Indo-European clans that came to dominate the adivasi, or aboriginal, people sometime around 500 b.c., though whether by casual migration or deliberate invasion remains unclear. Keay explores the subsequent divisions in Indian society—one that embraces hundreds of religious and ethnic groups—that made it possible for the Europeans to gain a foothold on the subcontinent and eventually to assume political control. He has small patience with European apologists who insist that India fell into Europe’s lap almost by accident, like an overripe fruit, insisting instead that Indian corruption was nothing compared to the power of European arms and the overarching desire for empire. And he condemns England’s sometimes lackadaisical, sometimes oppressive administration while sympathizing with the obvious logistical difficulties of ruling so distant a fiefdom. His chronicle closes in 1998 with the Indian government’s first nuclear-weapons test, which gave the world such a scare. Without peer among general studies, a history that is intelligent, incisive, and eminently readable. (60 maps, tables, and
charts; 32 pages b&w photos) (First printing of 25,000)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-800-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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 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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