Novelist Naipaul, his narrative talent not altogether muffled by facts (here a heavy implementation of secondary source materials) and understatement, uses two incidents three centuries apart to tell the story of the "Ghost Province" of the island of Trinidad and more largely that of the frustration and futility of the colonial experience. The El Dorado of the title, and the first story is that of forgotten conquistador Antonio de Berrio. He began at the age of 60 to search for gold, concluded it at 75, "forlorne," captive and insane. It has its larger implications as will the second episode. El Dorado was then, as it would be again for Raleigh and others, the symbol of a "complete, unviolated world" always a day away. In the second part (with an inset on the intervening revolutions and the degraded slave society that was Trinidad) the chimera of El Dorado gives way to the brutality of (mal) administration by the colonists: the torture of a slave girl, Luisa Calderon, by British Governor Picton, who imposed a rule of "impartial terror," is subsidiary to the larger conflicts. On the one hand, England tries to impose its ideal of "Britishness as an ideal of justice and protection"—never perhaps possible in this mixed society of mixed national interests or via First Commissioner Fullarton who came to put down Picton and defend Luisa (later in the courts of England). On the other hand, Picton was the "victim of people's conscience, of ideas of humanity and reason that were ahead of the reality," Fullarton, the interventionist, was an equal casualty of all that was "deformed" and exploited in colonial society. . . . Dense and demanding reading, certainly for those not predisposed, Naipaul's bipartite study is more important (especially for an English audience) than its locus as a substantial inquiry and indictment.
Pub Date: April 15, 1970
ISBN: 1400030765
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1970
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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