Fascinatingly recondite, but also fairly deadening: scarcely useable or even readable for most pleasure travelers.
De Villiers and Hirtle (Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic, 2004, etc.) team up again to tackle the long, knotty history of a metropolis famed as the home of fabulous wealth and Islamic scholarship.
De Villiers assumes the personality of a jaunty traveler, while Hirtle is the intrepid archival scholar in this crammed account of the city in northwest Africa that “became a shorthand metaphor for a much greater body of stories and legends” about the Arab world. The popular Victorian expression “from here to Timbuktu” captures its perceived mystery and inaccessibility; indeed, even Timbuktu’s location, six miles from the source of the Niger River, prompted confusion in early explorers, who often thought the Niger was the Nile. Nomadic Tuareg herdsmen probably named the city after the well of Buktu around the 11th century—or the name might mean “woman with a large navel” in a local language. The authors present both possibilities, followed by a benumbing list of foreign emperors, kings and sultans, as the pre-Islamic Ghana-Wagadu kingdom gave way to waves of Arab invaders who made Timbuktu a crossroads of the trans-Saharan commercial trade, attracting gold and holy men from the Maghreb. The great kingdom of Mansa Musa (1312–1332) was succeeded by Tuareg, then Songhai rulers. Timbuktu became an important center of learning with extensive libraries (now being preserved). The Moroccan invasion of 1590 ushered in a decline later exacerbated by militant jihadists and European colonizers. The authors attempt to lighten the load of all this convoluted history with modern “travelers’ tales,” depicting Timbuktu today as decrepit and dusty but still unusually polyglot and ethnically diverse. A few contemporary anecdotes, however, can’t disguise the fact that this is essentially an academic resource for bookish trekkers.
Fascinatingly recondite, but also fairly deadening: scarcely useable or even readable for most pleasure travelers.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1497-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
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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