A carefully restrained and delineated account makes for chilling reading.
This evenhanded history of the appalling slaughter at the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 puts the blame squarely on the incendiary rhetoric of the two opposing leaders.
Hindus and Muslims (and Sikhs and Christians) living tolerantly together for centuries on the subcontinent faced down their colonial oppressor, Britain, only then to turn against each other at the moment of liberation: How could this have happened? Singapore-based Asia editor for Bloomberg View Hajari sees a chasm in understanding between the two sides replete with “their own myopic and mutually contradictory version of events, which largely focus on blaming the other side or the British for provoking the slaughter.” The author begins his dark chronicle in the last year before the British transfer of power, when Viceroy Archibald Wavell passed his “breakdown plan” to the president of the Indian National Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Anglophile leader of the dominant Hindus and ally of Gandhi who fiercely believed that a multiethnic India was fundamental to the new nation’s identity. Nehru’s intractable nemesis, the equally urbane English barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the powerful Muslim League, was “prideful, biting, uncompromising,” and he scorned Nehru’s offer of a token position in the Hindu-dominated government. By 1940, Jinnah had envisioned “Pakistan” (acronym for the combined Muslim-dominated provinces of Punjab, tribal Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan) as allied with the British. Yet as the two sides dug in and the rhetoric escalated (Jinnah periodically calling for “Direct Action” while dismissing Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics), so did the sectarian bloodshed, rolling westward, from the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946 to the Punjab, Delhi and Kashmir. Hajari skillfully picks through this perilous history of mayhem and assassination of biblical proportions, which has left a “deadly legacy” of paranoia, terrorism and hatred between India and Pakistan 70 years later.
A carefully restrained and delineated account makes for chilling reading.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-547-66921-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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