Detailed portrayals of Filipinas in Hawaii that, despite occasionally weak writing, offer valuable information on an...
An anthology of nonfiction stories about Filipina immigrants, written by their children and grandchildren.
In this history collection, Brown (Kula San, 2010) brings together dozens of family stories about women who emigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in the first half of the 20th century. The author’s introduction places the memoirs in context, demonstrating that studies of the Filipino community have largely omitted these women’s experiences. There are common threads that run through these tales—traditional food, frugality, the practice of smoking the lit end of Toscani cigarettes—but there’s also a diversity of viewpoints, socioeconomic backgrounds, career paths and family environments. Most of the stories tell of women who joined their husbands on rural sugar plantations, but a few were middle-class housewives, and several pursued successful careers in real estate, fashion and catering. The writing is uneven, with some contributors producing far more fluent and polished prose than others, but all the narratives remarkably capture the rhythms and language of the Hawaiian Filipino dialect, with its elements of English, Hawaiian, Tagalog, Ilocano and Visayan: “No need go back! No need go backwarrds, always go porrwarrds! Why you like go back? You was derr already. Go someplace you neberr go yet. Datis how you learrn!” The stories are also notable for their range of attitudes about the past: few ever approach nostalgia, but not all condemn its world of plantation economics, substandard housing and tolerance for corporal punishment. All display how the Filipina experience shaped a substantial portion of today’s Hawaiians, which will make this book valuable to researchers. Although the book as a whole is limited by its stylistic shortcomings, it’s still a rich contribution to the literature on Hawaii’s diverse history. (Each story features recent and historical black-and-white photographs.)
Detailed portrayals of Filipinas in Hawaii that, despite occasionally weak writing, offer valuable information on an unexplored segment of society.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500539009
Page Count: 382
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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