An absorbing introduction to the culture of the Aymara, whose past and present are intimately linked to the landscapes of the high Andes. University of Chicago anthropologist/archaeologist Kolata has been working among the Aymara for two decades on agricultural projects that have captured international attention. His long acquaintance with this hard-working culture of farmers is evident throughout, as Kolata lucidly explains concepts that have guided that society for millennia. For instance, he explains that for the Aymara ``the place of time is inverted. It is the past that is in front of us, visible, knowable, graven in the physical world and in memory. . . . The future, on the other hand, lies behind, invisible and knowable only through ritual specialists trained in the arts of prognostication.'' Kolata guides the reader through the Aymara year, writing of seasons of sowing and harvest, of ritual cycles and pilgrimages, and of the small moments of everyday life in marketplaces, pool halls, and homes, giving us telling glimpses of the world in which these people live and removing somewhat their alien qualities—alien, at least, in First World eyes. At the heart of Kolata's book lie his descriptions of the ancient capital of Tiahuanaco, once a sacred city full of temples and stelae and now in ruins. Here Kolata occasionally falls into Indiana Jonesschool prose: ``Like all empires,'' he writes, ``Tiahuanaco, in its time, was forsaken by the gods and the ancestors. No amount of sacrificial blood flowing on the great earth shrines of the city would change its fate.'' Such lapses are atoned for by Kolata's well-reasoned consideration of the life and death of empires across history, an inexorable cycle of growth and decline. Kolata's clear perceptions and appreciations make this a fine study of a little-known society. (14 illustrations, maps)
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-57507-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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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