Travels in antique—and heavily armed—lands, many of them on a collision course with the American Empire.
Calcutta-born novelist (The Hungry Tide, 2005, etc.) and journalist Ghosh opens this collection of essays with a report that will seem all too immediate: In the wake of last year’s Christmas tsunami, he arrives in the Andaman Islands to discover that the place, a sort of virtual museum of tourist-oriented primitivism, has been devastated, of course—but also that no one was prepared, and no one in charge has the least idea of what to do next. As government officials make themselves scarce, stand-ins are pressed into service: priests, scientists, anyone who can write. “It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property while leaving nature largely unharmed,” Ghosh writes. The author’s meditation on the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center may be one of the most sensitive in the literature, as he wrestles to reconcile enormity with his credo “that nothing human should be alien to me.” At the center of the book is its most memorable piece, a tour of the front lines in a wildly alien place, a vast glacier in the Himalayas over which Pakistani and Indian troops have been warring for years. Even though it has “no strategic, military, or economic value whatsoever,” Siachen Glacier has become its own cause; returning from duty on the ice, a reputedly sane Indian officer proposes that it be melted with a nuclear device so as to flood Pakistan, sweep its inhabitants away and allow his troops to go home. Everywhere Ghosh travels he finds confusion and conflict—even, sad to say, in the republic of books that marks his graceful reminiscence of youth in Calcutta, “an oddly bookish city.”
Thoughtful, sometimes mournful essays on the state of the world, with little good news in sight.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-37806-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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