Far from being undercut by the new Indian elections, Naipaul has in essence overtaken events. When his inquiry into the Emergency appeared serially in the New York Review of Books, Indira Gandhi seemed destined to rule India for life; then, suddenly, elections were called, the Government fell, the Emergency officially ended. One saw the victors, in homespun, worshipping at Mohandas Gandhi's shrine, led by the new Prime Minister, Morarji Desai. "The Gandhianism of a man like Mr. Desai. . . offered nothing," Naipaul writes. "At its heart were the old Indian attitudes of defeat, the idea of withdrawal, a turning away from the world. . . 'simplicity.'" Close by is J. P. Narayan: on the eve of his 1975 imprisonment he reiterated Gandhi's 60-year-old appeal to Indian antiquity for independence from the British: "Swaraj means Ramraj," self-rule means Rama rule. "We have gone back to the solace of incantation," Naipaul observes in another context, "and back to Gandhi as to the only Indian truth." Gandhi is blamed for not leaving independent India with an ideology, for not giving its people an identity, in place of self-absorption, obedience, submission. Indians are blamed for embracing the "culture of distress" and eschewing self-examination. Rich Westerners are blamed for exporting "their romantic doubts about industrial civilization." Repeatedly: "Indian poverty is more dehumanizing than any machine." But the masses are stirring, Naipual finds, learning "new ways of seeing and feeling." A Cooperative irrigation scheme challenges the status quo. An industrial job, exercising new skills, is a source of pride. A Bombay squatters' settlement now governs itself: "Identity there was no problem; it was a discovery." Naipaul is angry and hopeful. Readers would be well advised to take his stimulating appraisal with the morning papers.
Pub Date: June 10, 1977
ISBN: 1400030757
Page Count: 175
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1977
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
