As exciting as a full-court press and a thoughtful study of young athletes in a world little known to outsiders.
A New York Times sportswriter follows a Navajo basketball squad through a championship-seeking season.
The Navajo reservation is, as sports reporter and one-time “rez” resident Powell writes, as big as Britain and as remote as the moon. Chinle, Arizona, one of its most populous towns, hosts a high school that draws students from a huge area. Into it, a few years ago, came a coach, “respected although perhaps not beloved,” who imposed discipline on a team used to playing “rez ball”—fast, explosive—and took them to the semifinals in a state where they were always the underdogs who had to travel for hours to get to their nearest opponents. The point guard was a foot shorter than the "strapping white boys" they went up against. Another player dreamed of going to college and studied advanced calculus, a course taught at Chinle High by a Pakistani immigrant. Coach Mendoza is tough and demanding, the students sometimes resentful; yet they pull together, scrappily taking down their opponents game by game, “a coiled snake…vibrating and ready to strike.” For all the exotic locale, Powell could have easily fallen into sporty clichés. He doesn’t, instead delivering a deeply felt portrait of life in a place where alcohol is a constant killer and the outside world ever encroaching but that, despite poverty, is so beautiful that Navajos mourn being outside it. The author writes with elegance about the Diné Bikéyah, or Navajo world (“night’s cold had acquired a knife-sharp edge and Spider Woman had knit a million stars into a milky glow”), and his on-the-boards scenes are full of action, if sometimes too closely focused on the repeated motif of the mean coach who “often…lashed at the Wildcats for their mistakes and uneven effort even in victory” while leading them to unprecedented achievement.
As exciting as a full-court press and a thoughtful study of young athletes in a world little known to outsiders.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53466-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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