In reflective prose, Hardy fully fleshes out the denizens of this remote and troubled corner of the world.
Novelist and Financial Times writer Hardy (The Wonder House, 2006, etc.) gently probes changes within family and village life in the Kashmir Valley two decades after insurgency strife.
The author vacationed among the lakes of the idyllic Valley since her youth, returning often with her mother to live on a houseboat until the insurgency for Kashmir independence disrupted the region. From late 1989, as the Islamic militants terrorized villages, threatened the local Hindus, kidnapped male youths to be sent to training camps on the Pakistan border and forced women to cover up, life in the valley, formerly “a place of picnics and flirtation,” became fraught and dangerous. In 1997, Hardy met and stayed with the Dars, an extended family of Muslim houseboat owners and carpet sellers who became itinerant salesmen once the tourist business collapsed. From listening patiently to the stories of Mohammad Dar and his three brothers, their father, wives and friends, Hardy fashions a richly textured narrative of this traumatized culture. Mohammad sent his sons to a Tablighi Jamaat school in the United Kingdom to complete their education, which was interrupted by war, and also to remove them from the lure of becoming “martyrs” for the separatist cause, which essentially emptied villages of young men, leaving grieving families and hospitals full of shell-shocked victims. Hardy interviewed former militants who fled the training camps because of abuse and inhuman conditions, and returned without hope. Meanwhile the women remain shut up behind walls in a highly patriarchal society, without access to education or notions of a wider world. The author peers deeply into this chaotic region and the needs and desires of the people who seek a fuller life.
In reflective prose, Hardy fully fleshes out the denizens of this remote and troubled corner of the world.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0289-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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