Bombay is the only city in India, Mehta observes, where more people want to lose weight than gain it. Though this overlong...
An ambitious portrait of the megalopolis—one that, like its subject, contains worlds but is too big and too crowded for comfort.
Bombayite–turned–New Yorker Mehta, a writer of fiction and film scripts, returned to his native city for a two-year stint in 1998, and his experiences form the heart of this excited report. “Bombay,” he writes, “is the future of urban civilization on the planet.” He adds: “God help us.” From its birth as an entrepôt, the island city—its booster considering it the next Singapore, “relieved of having to bear the burden of this tiresome country,” Mother India—has swelled unimaginably; the population in 2005 is expected to reach 27.5 million, and “by 2015, there will be more people living in Bombay than in all of Italy.” Much demand and little supply yields challenges—Mehta had to pay $3,000 a month for a so-so apartment—but at least, Indians say, no one starves in Bombay, which is why the place adds 500 residents every day of the year. Mehta can be both learned and obscure—at one point, he writes, “I chase plumbers, electricians, and carpenters like Werther chasing Lotte”—but also very funny. Yet, when he wanders from the leafy, comfortable districts into the criminal and sexual demimondes of Bombay, he is transfixed and a-swoon, as when he writes of one batch of gangsters: “Why am I not tired of listening to them? Why do the nine hours pass by effortlessly, as with a new lover?” Similarly, his account of the making of a Bollywood film contains plenty of interest and humor (Hollywood demands that a musical’s song fit the plot, he writes, but “Hindi movies face no such fascist guidelines”). Still, at 80 pages alone, it goes on much too long.
Bombay is the only city in India, Mehta observes, where more people want to lose weight than gain it. Though this overlong work could stand to shed a few pounds itself, it’s rich with insight and unfailingly well-written.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-40372-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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