A change of pace for the authors, who have written extensively on Germany (The Fall of Berlin,1994), but their history of the British in India is just as good. The British government got into the act with the Honorable East India Company in 1773 when the company was baled out of a financial embarrassment. British rule of the subcontinent was always remarkable for the way in which a tiny civil service, some 1,000 strong, and a small army controlled a country that, by the end of British rule, had a population of 400 million. Equally remarkable was the loyalty of the Indian people: During the WW I, nearly one and a half million Indians volunteered for military service. By the end of the war, the mood had soured, in part because expectations had been raised as to what Britain’s reaction would be. The history of the next 30 years, in less skillful hands, could have been a dreary tale of misunderstandings, mistrust, and missed opportunities, but it is relieved by the unflagging zest of the authors and their lively understanding of the frailties and foibles of the participants: Gandhi, part politician, part saint, of whom it was said —Ah, if the Mahatma only knew what it costs us for him to live the simple life—; Nehru, who followed him and spent nine years of his life in prison; Jinnah, a brilliant lawyer who found in Pakistan his last and greatest client; and Mountbatten, whose charm rescued negotiations time and again, but at whose door the authors lay the blame for the haste of the British departure and the huge loss of life. They may be too severe. Something drastic was needed just to bring the arguments to an end. The authors may also err in describing this as Britain’s proudest day. But their history is a stirring achievement.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04594-3
Page Count: 566
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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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