A haunting memoir and tribute to an extraordinary comrade-at-arms.
Intensely vivid story of war and the peculiar breed of warriors who fight it in 21st-century Africa.
An award-winning filmmaker and frontline war reporter, Brabazon cut his teeth in the Liberian rainforest, marching hundreds of miles with the rebels of Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, who were seeking to overthrow the despotic Charles Taylor in February 2002. Before the author’s reports for the BBC radio, the existence of LURD was just a rumor. But for the company of a seasoned South African military man and adventurer named Nick du Toit, it might have been up to another intrepid journalist to get the scoop. The green Brabazon might not have survived even the dysentery that laid him low a few days into the journey, let alone gunfire or worse during bloody skirmishes with Taylor’s troops, if not for du Toit’s experienced hand nearby. Their bond survived the horrors of Liberia’s civil war on that trip and others, despite the author’s suspicions (and friends’ warnings) about du Toit’s history with the apartheid-era Special Forces and his new careers as arms dealer and soldier of fortune. The man the author knew seemed gentle and humane, as well as fearless. Brabazon’s respect for du Toit led him to seriously consider his invitation to film a coup he and “business partners” were plotting against another despot, Teodoro Obiango of Equatorial Guinea. Ironically, a family tragedy saved the author from his friend’s fate: capture by Obiango and horrific torture at the hands of his security forces in the notorious Black Beach prison, where Obiango had begun his career in brutality. The book opens with stomach-churning accounts of the torture that du Toit and his co-conspirators suffered, based partly on videos the torturers made. Brabazon himself was unflinching as a documentarian of war, and his prose is no less sparing, whether describing the gruesome reality of guerrilla combat or the agonizing moral quandaries of battle. The first two-thirds of the book offer as thrilling a narrative as any war novel on the shelves, and the finale is as clear a picture of the murky world of postcolonial Africa as the readers are likely to get.
A haunting memoir and tribute to an extraordinary comrade-at-arms.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1975-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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