Shining Path was significant enough to warrant a better book at the hands of someone like Mark Bowden. For the moment,...
Drawing on Peruvian government archives, two scholars recount the fortunes of a headline-grabbing Peruvian guerrilla movement.
It’s never a good idea to join a political party founded by college professors, who think in coldblooded abstractions. Such was certainly the case with Abimael Guzmán, who, in 1980, founded Shining Path, a Maoist-with-deviations gang in which his wife and other women took leadership roles. As Starn (Cultural Anthropology/Duke Univ.; The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal, 2011, etc.) and La Serna (History/Univ. of North Carolina; The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency, 2012, etc.) show, there wasn’t much questioning of the supreme leader, who took the curious path of attacking peasants as well as government troops. For its part, the Peruvian government, which, under Alberto Fujimori, was certainly corrupt enough to merit a revolution, committed atrocities of its own even while preparing for the day of Guzmán’s fall by building a maximum security prison intended just for him. Of interest to literary historians is the go-between investigative work of the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who emerged from events disgusted enough to quit politics and move to Spain. “The citizenship change, Fujimori taunted, showed that his globe-trotting rival had never been a real Peruvian in the first place,” write the authors, though Vargas Llosa had his revenge by winning the Nobel Prize a few years later. Guzmán was eventually caught and imprisoned, ending Shining Path’s most active period. The authors do a fair job of recounting events, though often ham-fistedly: The fact that Silence of the Lambs was playing in Lima movie theaters at the time does not qualify Guzmán for the sobriquet “Peru’s own Hannibal Lecter,” and it’s a bit overblown to throw in the gruesome torture of rebel leader Túpac Amaru two centuries earlier as evidence for how comparatively easy the “white doctor and…celebrity prisoner” Guzmán had it.
Shining Path was significant enough to warrant a better book at the hands of someone like Mark Bowden. For the moment, however, this adequate one will do.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-29280-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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