A deft, intimate portrayal of a young woman’s growth through education.
Raj’s first book amazes. At 20 years old, she writes a memoir of uncommon grace and wisdom.
Born into an “untouchable” family in the South India village of Thattaguppe, the author suspects she may have eluded Vidhiy-Amma, “mother fate,” when she was chosen to go to a special school. Her younger sister and brother stayed behind with her parents, whose relationship existed within restrictive roles: her mother seemed devoid of hope and authority; her father, struggling to provide, responded to marital conflict with violence. For Raj, studying at Shanti Bhavan (or “Abode of Peace”) meant learning how to swim and speak English, how to enjoy good food and to avoid an early marriage. “I was very happy and free here—in a world where hardship, poverty, violence, and hunger didn’t exist,” she writes. But these luxuries came at a cost: losing fluency in Kannada, her mother tongue, and a limited connection with family. She felt she was living in two worlds, “each alien to the other.” Disconnection was most poignant in the case of her sister Kavya, whose unexpected death at 14 remains a mystery. A casualty of sexual violence and perhaps suicide precipitated by it, Kavya represents an alternative fate the author may have met. A falling out with Kavya opens the book; a haunting dedication to the lost sister completes it. The pacing moves with a sure step as the narrative uncovers complex layers of cultural challenges. Though Raj’s depiction of her school is so praiseful that it approaches propaganda, Shanti Bhavan’s power over a child—who remained there until adulthood—is indeed a credible expression of love. As her mother cleaned houses in Singapore and her father scared off wild elephants in the sugar cane fields near the village, the author planned for college and a career. She was given the chance to transcend her family history and perhaps her own karma, knowledge of which she has “long coveted.” If sarayam, the bootlegged liquor made from sugar cane, dictates village economy and life, it will not dictate hers.
A deft, intimate portrayal of a young woman’s growth through education.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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 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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