Rigorously researched, intelligent, compassionate. A tour de force. (2 maps, 50 illustrations, not seen)
Masterfully demonstrating that truth can trump fiction, English travel writer Dalrymple (From the Holy Mountain, 1998, etc.) relates a wrenching tale of love’s labors lost on the Indian subcontinent.
In the last years of the 18th century, Major James Achilles Kirkpatrick, British Resident at the Court of Hyderabad, fell in love with and eventually married Khair un-Nissa Begum, a bright and beautiful teenager, the great-niece of the local diwan (prime minister). The couple’s son and daughter went to live in England with their paternal grandfather and never saw their mother again. The daughter, Kitty, later became the object of Thomas Carlyle’s amorous attentions (unconsummated) and served as the model for a character in Sartor Resartus. Dalrymple discovered the threads of this story during a brief sojourn in Hyderabad and quickly realized they could form a most attractive tapestry. His research is extensive, meticulous, even astonishing as he chases his characters across continents, unearthing a surprising number of critical documents that provide fuel for the light he casts over these long-obscured events. The British authorities were so alarmed about their Resident’s behavior that they held several investigations; the author located official reports and quotes liberally from them. But Kirkpatrick was such an asset to the British cause in the region—he negotiated tricky treaties, spoke the local languages, finessed and eventually expelled the French—that he kept his position despite the scandal and the determined efforts to dislodge him made by India’s Governor General, the intractable Richard Wellesley (brother of Arthur, Duke of Wellington). Illness eventually killed Kirkpatrick at age 41, and his widow took up with his assistant, who—unlike his deceased superior—yielded to enormous pressures and gave her up. Dalrymple argues that the Brits “went native” a lot more than has been commonly thought and that West can meet East if love is the lingua franca.
Rigorously researched, intelligent, compassionate. A tour de force. (2 maps, 50 illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03184-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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