Alternately amusing and depressing, a hit-or-miss book of political satire.
The lighter side of tyranny.
Those who appreciated the satirical bite of Borat will find a kindred spirit here, though enjoying Norwegian journalist Hem’s humor is easier if you forget the brutality, impoverishment, imprisonment, and murder that come along with despotism. The author draws from personal experience living in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe as well as anecdotal evidence from the totalitarian regimes in Uganda, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere. “ ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,’ said Abraham Lincoln. Obviously, he was no dictator,” writes the author, who shows readers how to become a dictator and stay in power as well as how to behave while in power (get rich, help your friends and family, become extravagant in your furnishings and sexual appetites) and how to plan for the possibility that your reign might end. Hem uses facts to underscore his absurdities, such as the ascent of a Central African dictator: “The total coronation cost is calculated to be $22 million, a fourth of the country’s annual budget. At that point, two-thirds of the country’s four million inhabitants lived on less than one dollar a day.” Funny? Or tragic? Maybe such atrocity is best reflected through the fun-house mirror, and maybe more readers will learn about the conditions under which much of the world lives through such a satirical approach. And maybe someone will be motivated enough to follow its precepts to achieve the rewards it promises—though becoming a dictator, the author acknowledges, is easiest if your father is one or if you have an army behind you. “If you succeed as dictator,” writes Hem, “you are guaranteed a life filled with excitement, unlimited power, a population that worships you like a god, and, most of all, fantastic wealth.”
Alternately amusing and depressing, a hit-or-miss book of political satire.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-660-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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