Brazil will be under enormous pressure to win this summer, and Uruguay and Argentina will be in the running. That will...
The most comprehensive history of soccer in the part of the world in which it may well mean the most.
Campomar, publishing director of Constable & Robinson in the U.K., provides a thorough, engaging history of the development of fútbol and its place in Latin American society. The author focuses mostly on the 20th century, when the game went from being an English import geared primarily toward British expatriates and elites to being the domain of the masses, who worshipped their heroes, condemned their goats, and filled the terraces for their club and national teams. Campomar also illustrates the way soccer reflected and sometimes fueled political developments across the region. He covers a large geographic swath including Mexico and Central America but gives the bulk of his attention to the countries of South America, where he interweaves the story of the local club game into that of the national teams, which have allowed the region to take its place, even if only for 90 or so minutes at a time, with the Europeans. Clearly timed for the summer’s World Cup in Brazil, the book illustrates how the Río de la Plata nations of Uruguay and Argentina represented the continent’s pre-eminent powers through the first half of the 20th century, with the Brazilians rising to dominance only in the 1950s. Campomar effectively brings out the color and passion for the game, its evocative language, its artistic power and its sometimes-martial ugliness. While the author occasionally tries to do too much, he accomplishes his task with verve.
Brazil will be under enormous pressure to win this summer, and Uruguay and Argentina will be in the running. That will provide opportunities for the updated paperback edition of this fine, scintillating history.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-586-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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