Dillard's encounters with Chinese writers took place both in China, as part of a US delegation, and in the US, as host to a Chinese delegation: "here were the same events: formal meetings about writers' goals and cultural differences, and informal meetings of comedy or collusion." But in these brief, designedly "Chekhovian" narratives, there are few explicit contrasts or comparisons; only in the introduction does Dillard point out that, exposed to Southern California luxury beyond her experience, "the Chinese, fresh from Beijing, took it in stride." The meetings in China, mostly with literary functionaries, are notable on two scores: each side's misapprehension of the other's literature ("They go straight from Shakespeare to Catch-22, as it were, pausing at Washington Irving"; we hardly go beyond Maxine Hong Kingston, a "mishmash" to them); the American reluctance to nominate contemporary American writers for translation ("How many trees should they fell to print what, and why? Doctorow? Mailer? Roth?"). Otherwise, there is further word of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution ("Could it happen again?"), further signs of total Chinese commitment to ends (now, modernization—"the function of every shoe, every tree. . . every novelist, poet, cobbler"). And yet the Chinese delegates are warm, exuberant, humorous, poised . . . only stumped, perhaps, by Allen Ginsberg (a sly, winning presence here). Dillard is particularly taken with winsome, stylish, "young" (45) Zhang Jie and her mercurial responses—as in their joint encounter with a Malibu bathroom phone or Zhang Die's hands-over-ears reaction to Francine du Plessix Gray's street-talk metaphors. Other disarming moments occur from Disneyland to Walden Pond. Among post-Mao cultural crossovers, this small volume is overshadowed by both Arthur Miller's Salesman in Beijing (p. 247) and William Zinsser's Willie and Dwike (p. 449). Yet it has an easy charm only occasionally compromised by good fellowship sentimentality or interpretive strivings. (It also serves to offset—were that necessary—Liu Zongren's sour, disaffected Two Years in the Melting Pot, below.)
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1984
ISBN: 0819561568
Page Count: 119
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
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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