A remarkably gripping popular history.
A British historian’s page-turning record of the madness seizing the Caribbean at the Cold War’s zenith.
By the 1950s, decades of U.S. interference in Latin American affairs helped account for the installation of three Caribbean dictators: The Dominican’s Rafael Trujillo, Haiti’s “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista were all absolute rulers who oppressed their own people, but in return for millions of aid dollars they reliably protected U.S. military and commercial interests—until they didn’t. Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution spooked the U.S. government, leading three successive presidents to mistake powerful nationalist impulses and widespread anti-Americanism for a robust, regional communist movement. Castro’s success aroused Soviet interest and encouraged Trujillo and Duvalier to exploit American fears and to play the superpowers against each other. Countering perceived threats, some real, most not, the U.S. proceeded down a dizzying path where violence, conspiracy and murder were the order of the day. Von Tunzelmann (Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, 2007) regularly supercharges her sweeping narrative—predictable set pieces include Duvalier’s grotesque reign of terror, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis—with revealing, intimate details about her protagonists: the macho posturing of Khrushchev and JFK, the sybaritic preoccupations of Trujillo and his family, the lurid arts practiced by Papa Doc and his henchman, Clémont Barbot, and the complex relationship among Fidel, his brother Raúl and Che Guevara. She artfully mixes the ambitions, love lives, drug use, grievances, deceptions and miscalculations of these and a host of lesser characters with grand historical themes. The result amounts to a mesmerizing, Conradian tale where the truth is almost too dark to bear.
A remarkably gripping popular history.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9067-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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