Woods acknowledges failures, such as the fall of Winnie Mandela, while concluding that the emergence of a free South Africa...
A noted South African exile returns to his homeland to find that wondrous changes have taken place since the fall of apartheid.
Journalist Woods fled South Africa in 1977 after running afoul of the Botha government one time too many, this time after naming names in the murder of his friend, the black activist Steve Biko, events that Woods recounted in his book Cry Freedom (the basis for Richard Attenborough’s 1987 film of the same name). In 1990, the South African regime, now led by F.W. De Klerk, released another activist, Nelson Mandela, from prison after 27 years and pardoned thousands of dissidents, including Woods. Thus he was able to return in August 1990 to a country that he had regarded as “enemy territory in my mind.” Among the first signs he saw that change was coming to his homeland was Mandela’s campaign of charming former enemies with simple courtesy, as when he called on a hospitalized member of the hated apartheid government. “Bloodthirsty terrorists do not usually act like gentle old grandfathers,” writes Woods, adding that Mandela’s statesmanship set an important example for South Africa as it struggled onto a democratic course. Finding that way was by no means simple, and Woods offers many examples of how cultures that had existed side by side for generations still could not understand one another. Another important step was taken, he writes, when, following the first free election in April 1994, the government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to expose and document the crimes of apartheid for posterity. “The chairman of the commission, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, said exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, as he had done so often in South Africa’s political past,” writes Woods: namely, that a new class of censors and secret policemen would not replace the old in the course of reckoning.
Woods acknowledges failures, such as the fall of Winnie Mandela, while concluding that the emergence of a free South Africa was “a brilliant achievement.” Readers of this vivid memoir will surely agree.Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-233-00052-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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