An absorbing account of South Africa's recent five-year ``negotiated revolution.'' Johannesburg-based veteran reporter Sparks (The Mind of South Africa, 1990) is well situated to interview both apartheid-era Afrikaner officials and members of the African National Congress. Though current South African president Nelson Mandela also describes some of this process in his recent autobiography (Long Walk to Freedom, p. 1473), Sparks's broader lens provides a fuller picture. Justice Minister Kobie Coetsee, Sparks reports, was enlightened by an old classmate who got to know Winnie Mandela when she was banished to a small town, and he agreed to the imprisoned Nelson Mandela's request for a meeting (``He took complete command of the situation,'' the minister said). This was 1985. Soon officials were taking Mandela for secret excursions to see his country, ANC officials were sneaking exiles into prison to brief Mandela, and government advisers were meeting ANC leaders in Europe. Eventually, practical reformer F.W. de Klerk replaced blustery P.W. Botha as state president. Though de Klerk initially envisioned ``power sharing'' rather than majority rule, the release of Mandela and political normalization that began in 1990 unleashed its own momentum. Sparks covers ``a chain of crises'' during negotiations—police massacres (including a chilling scene the author observed), a disastrous ANC incursion in the Ciskei homeland, a Zulu political civil war. He also cites keys to progress, like the emergence of young Afrikaner politicians and the conciliatory role of demonized Communist Joe Slovo, who, recognizing that an ANC government could not install its own civil service, proposed a five-year power-sharing plan. Sparks writes that the country ``could develop into a model for the gradual solution'' of the world's North-South economic divide. While he offers several solid reasons for optimism (e.g., a culture of negotiation), he acknowledges that South African blacks now have high expectations that will be difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Though fuzzy on the future, a remarkable story about a remarkable episode in world history.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8090-9405-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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