by Zeinab Badawi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 14, 2025
An elegant and vibrant African history that will appeal to novices and experts alike.
An immersive and passionate history of Africa from the earliest times to the present.
Africa’s representation has long been riddled with stereotypes and errors indicative of widespread refusal to take its history seriously. Mainstream news coverage and cultural productions about the continent prioritize poverty, violence, and kleptocratic leaders. Badawi’s dazzling book rejects these racist caricatures in favor of a “holistic” and “honest” history that treats African history and humanity in its fullness. “I aim,” she writes, “to provide a counter-balance to the many negative perceptions of the continent and its people.” Badawi weaves a lustrous tapestry of Africa’s past that centers the African protagonists whose triumphs and defeats deserve more attention. She brings welcome attention to lesser-known figures, including women, who are difficult to locate in historical sources but who nonetheless shaped history. Famous African women leaders Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Queen Kahina, Njinga, and Yaa Asantewaa all receive substantive treatment here. Yet Badawi also evokes less visible histories: for instance, her engrossing portrait of events in the Senegalese kingdom Nder in 1819, when women resisted an Arab slaving raid first by defending themselves with whatever weapons were on hand. When it became clear they could not defeat the slavers, they chose death, locking themselves in a village structure and setting it aflame. Badawi’s account of this “heroic sacrifice” renders an indelible image of ordinary African women as historical actors. Relying on local African experts to disrupt misguided Western narratives and emphasizing Africa’s history before European colonization, Badawi takes readers on a personal journey steeped in wonder and care for the continent and its peoples. Her crystalline, sometimes lighthearted writing propels the journey across every region of the continent, illuminating political, religious, and military histories and the personalities that enlivened them. This is not an academic text, as Badawi readily acknowledges. But it is a learned text, one that delivers on its promise of narrating an African history of Africa.
An elegant and vibrant African history that will appeal to novices and experts alike.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780063335417
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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