In an account that is both living history and historical document, a now-vanished tribe of Paraguayan Indians is described as it lives out its last few years of existence. This document was unearthed some 20 years after novelist Auster translated it from the French, through a serendipitous encounter with one of his fans who had purchased a bound galley from a used bookstore. Clastres, who died before the translation was to have been published, lived with this tribe for two years in 1963 and 1964 in a compound that was under the protection of a white Paraguayan. The arrangement for the Indians was through necessity; their numbers had diminished from constant harassment by white settlers. Although their benefactor siphoned off food and other supplies given by the government, this last remnant was at least safe from the encroaching 20th century. As Clastres gained their confidence, he began piecing together the rituals of their daily lives. The Guayaki permitted him to witness birth, which to the Indians was a dangerous cosmic imbalance; the father is sentenced to death by his child’s birth and can only escape his immediate fate by killing an animal in the forest. Clastres observed the physically painful initiation rites for young men, after which they were permitted to have sexual relations with women. The anthropologist also followed the tribe into the forest where it searched for honey and grubs or hunted monkeys or coati. Forest existence was precarious: The Guayaki faced danger from jaguars (an old woman was taken by one during Clastres’s stay) and in earlier days from neighboring but related tribes, whose long-simmering feuds would lead to periodic violence. But Clastres saves the best for last: The Guayaki were cannibals, eating not only the bodies of enemy warriors but also their own dead. The account is anything but dry and didactic; Clastres wrote a vibrant but inescapably poignant study about one more doomed tribe of indigenous people. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-942299-77-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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