Fascinating—and most entertaining—from start to finish.
An intriguing historical footnote teased into epic.
As he did with The Napoleon of Crime (1997), London Times columnist Macintyre (The Englishman’s Daughter, 2002) finds an unlikely hero in a 19th-century American who defied convention and got himself in hot water for his troubles. The man in question was a young Pennsylvania Quaker, Josiah Harlan, who left his comfortable home and made his way to India. There, in the dusty streets of Peshawar, he made the acquaintance of an exiled Afghan potentate who promised him endless wealth and power if only Harlan would lead an army to Kabul and overthrow the usurper. (The potentate added that he would have done so already, but he was “concerned for the safety of the harem, which he could hardly take into battle.”) That was apparently all Harlan needed to hear, and in no time he was charging around in the highest elevations of the Hindu Kush, where he planted an American flag. Long before the arrival of the English in Afghanistan, Harlan was living the fine life of a pale god; in the end, he bore many titles: “Prince of Ghor, Paramount Chief of the Hazarajat, Lord of Kurram, governor of Jasrota and Gujrat . . . Chief Sirdar and Commandant of the invincible armies of Dost Mohammed Khan, mighty Amir of Kabul, Pearl of the Ages and Commander of the Faithful.” Macintyre reasonably suggests that Harlan’s adventures in Afghanistan—which ended thanks to British perfidy—inspired Rudyard Kipling’s great story “The Man Who Would Be King,” save that the real-life tale’s denouement was far less interesting: after scandal-tinged service as a Union officer in the Civil War, Harlan wound up in San Francisco practicing medicine without a license and presumably bragging to whomever would listen about his “sojourn of eighteen years amongst the Pagan and Mohamedan communities of the East.”
Fascinating—and most entertaining—from start to finish.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-20178-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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