Well-written but with the feel of a magazine article masquerading as a book.
The story of a basketball journeyman caught up in the civil war in Libya.
Born in Nigeria, where he began shooting hoops into a milk crate nailed to a tree at age 6, Owumi came to the United States with his parents at age 11. Though he played solid basketball at Alcorn State, a small black college in Mississippi, Owumi went undrafted in the 2008 NBA draft. Faced with a choice between playing in the NBA minor league or with better-paying overseas teams, he embarked on an adventure that brought him from playing for French, Macedonian and other teams to his 2010 acceptance of an offer to join a Libyan team funded by the family of President Moammar Gadhafi. More than half the book traces the scrappy Owumi’s early life (his grandfather was a village chief), his early days bouncing around among community college basketball teams, and his satisfying two seasons at Alcorn State, where he finally learned “the harsh lesson of life after college basketball: You are where you played.” Although Paisner (Chasing Perfect: The Will to Win in Basketball and Life, 2013, etc.) foreshadows the coming Libyan crisis nicely, the early pages are overblown and less than exciting. Finally, Owumi arrived in Benghazi, where he lived in a penthouse apartment owned by Gadhafi’s son and learned he was expected to play winning ball or be beaten. Play had hardly begun when the violence erupted outside his window. Frightened and without food, water or phone service, Owumi remained trapped in his apartment for two weeks, surviving by eating cockroaches and worms. The scenes of violence outside his door and in the streets are rendered vividly, and readers will cheer his eventual escape to Egypt, where Owumi joined yet another basketball team and won an MVP award.
Well-written but with the feel of a magazine article masquerading as a book.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60961-516-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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