What began with The Warrior Woman—Chinese immigrant women—is now continued with the focus on the China Men who left China for the Gold Mountain; and all of Kingston's different impulses—curatorial, reconstructive, celebratory, quizzical—are again brought into play. Starting with a remembrance of her father's misogynistic curses issued while he ironed in the family laundry in Stockton, California (Dog vomit. Your mother's cunt. Your mother's smelly cunt), Kingston traces backward and miscellaneously. There are the Chinese, for instance, who came to Hawaii and cut cane, who at day's end would cut huge holes in the earth and shout home greetings to China. Or those who swung out in baskets over ravines in the Sierra Nevada mountains to set explosive charges for railroad bridges (Through the wickerwork, slivers of depths darted like needles, nothing between him and air but thin rattan. Gusts of wind spun the light baskets)—only to be driven out of the territory after the railroad was built. And family stories: the uncles who quite acceptably saw ghosts or who turned paranoid or who were driven mad by guilt and cured by expiation. Kingston's non-sentimental approach to ethnicity remains one of her strongest bases—her knowledge that a people's particular and real madness is one of its most enduring flavors. Meanwhile, too, the autobiographical thread runs snakily throughout: Kingston's father's myth-encrusted coming-to-America begins a cycle that ends with her brother's being stationed in Taiwan during the Vietnam War. And it's all delivered in short, clustering swags of prose—which usually have a hypnotically appealing command; when not, the jigsaw-puzzle approach—piece next to piece—does sometimes flirt with imagist pretension. But, self-conscious lapses aside, this remains in sum—like Warrior Woman—exemplary history in the personal, investigatory mode.
Pub Date: June 13, 1980
ISBN: 0679723285
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1980
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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