A thorough study deeply informed by on-the-ground reporting.
Economist Latin American columnist Reid (Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul, 2008) provides a knowledgeable overview of the vast, vibrant country that will host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The seventh largest economy, the third largest food exporter, the world’s fourth most populous democracy, a country of enormous natural resources, including self-sufficiency in oil, Brazil has had a peaceable, productive recent rise in fortune. However, that emerges from a history of colonialism, slavery and poverty, writes the author. He touches on such recurrent Brazilian problems as the lack of political organization, which was noticeable as early as the Tupi-speaking Indians’ first encounter with Portuguese seafarer Pedro Álvares Cabral on the Brazilian coast in 1500. (They had neither the metals nor the domesticated animals prevalent in the nearby, highly developed Incan, Aztec or Mayan civilizations.) Reid also sifts carefully through the reasons for and long-term ramifications of Brazil’s huge demand for African slaves between 1500 and 1866. The shorter route to Africa, the exchange of export goods for slaves, the inability to attract free labor and the high mortality in its tropical climate are among the factors he explores. Food shortages and poor diet would plague the Brazilian people (and their economy) up until the modern era. The expulsion of the Jesuits in the 18th century left an “education vacuum,” and the Portuguese crown did not encourage the building of universities; the vacuum remains problematic today. Although the Europeans turned Brazil into a highly stratified and patriarchal society, Reid notes that they also fostered the rich blending of African, Indian and Portuguese people and cultures that formed “the main achievement of the colonial period.” In the 20th century, Brazil built a strong nation-state, beginning with dictator-turned–elected president Getúlio Vargas, through the rule of the generals to the forging of a democracy after the 2002 electoral triumph of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
A thorough study deeply informed by on-the-ground reporting.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-16560-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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