Sharp-edged, politically astute and pessimistic: a good complement to John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent...
Africa has been largely free for half a century, and the resources many of its nations contain are ever more precious. Yet, writes long-time Africa observer Meredith (Elephant Destiny: Biography of an Endangered Species in Africa, 2003, etc.), “Africa’s prospects are bleaker than ever before.”
Meredith’s complex but highly accessible narrative has a dramatis personae dozens strong. One representative figure is Kwame Nkrumah, who was there at the start of the continent’s independence movement. Jailed by the British for antigovernment activity, he was released in 1951 only to become, instantly, prime minister of the new independent nation of Ghana. He began as a sincere left democrat, it seems, then drew closer to socialism as a proven modernizer of developing nations, then claimed for himself the ability “of achieving for Africa what Marx and Lenin had done for Europe and Mao Tse-tung for China” by promulgating “Nkrumahism.” He then began to press for leadership of a pan-African union—which peers such as Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta and Hastings Banda did not grant him. Nkrumah’s supposedly loyal subjects deposed him in 1966. Military coups would topple similarly ambitious leaders in Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Uganda and elsewhere, and bring down the emperor of Ethiopia, the one country in Africa not to have been colonized. Those military coups often had the effect of instilling yet another cult-of-personality-mad strongman, as with Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, which he would eventually deem to be an empire. Meredith’s account is more descriptive than prescriptive, but he does point to trends that could be repeated anywhere in the world: a strong leader rises, surrounds himself with a ruling elite, becomes distant from the people, eventually starts thinking of himself as a god, then falls—or, as in the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, largely disappears from view while others do the ruling. Sadly, that pattern has been repeated many times over in Africa, the victim of more than its share of “vampire-like politicians.”
Sharp-edged, politically astute and pessimistic: a good complement to John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1999).Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-246-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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