A clear and troubling picture of a country forced to embrace madness.
Two Swedish artists (one visual, the other musical) record their impressions of a one-week sojourn in North Korea in 2008.
Originally published in Sweden in 2011, this text has a busy agenda. Not only do the authors tell about their sightseeing (limited as it was), but they also interweave the story of the 1978 kidnappings of popular South Korean actress and filmmaker Choi Eun-hee and her ex-husband, filmmaker Shin Sang-ok, whom Kim Jong-il, then the head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department, brought to the North, where he gave them substantial financial support for their filmmaking. (For more detailed information about this remarkable story, see Paul Fischer’s A Kim Jong-il Production, 2015). Other subjects the authors deal with: the monster-film genre in the region (especially in Japan), the history of the North-South split, impressions of other writers about North Korea, and the mythmaking that political strongmen find essential. During their visit to the North, the authors—and the others with their group—were fiercely restricted: no photographs without prior approval from government officials and no wandering off. The authors speculate that much of what they saw was stage-managed (are those commuters or actors?), and they were deeply skeptical about what they were told—numerous shrines, they believe, are bogus. Near the end, they begin to wonder what the North Korean people really think about their lives. There is, the authors realize, no way to know. The prose is clear, even graceful at times, and the style is seamless. The authors were able to score a long interview with Madame Choi, and from her, they elicit some ambivalence about her tenure in the country. She and her ex appreciated, for example, the substantial state support for their art.
A clear and troubling picture of a country forced to embrace madness.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77089-880-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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