by Andrew Marshall ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 31, 2002
Excellent from first word to last.
Travels, both madcap and somber, into the terra incognita of Burma.
No, not Myanmar, insists British journalist Marshall (coauthor with David E. Kaplan, The Cult at the End of the World: The Incredible Story of Aum, 1996): the Taliban-like military dictatorship that has ruled Burma since 1962 coined that name as “part of an unpopular and cynical campaign against the country’s minority peoples.” The hook on which Marshall hangs his lively narrative is the familiar travel-lit ploy of following in the footsteps of some previous voyager, in this instance the encyclopedist, linguist, and explorer George Scott, “the last of the guilt-free imperialists,” whose careful gazetteering left no detail of Burmese life unturned. By this account, Scott was a thoughtful, generally likable fellow, as imperialists and data-gatherers go; Marshall uses his predecessor’s observations as a sort of tuning fork against which to sound his own. These range from the outright grim (the dictatorship’s vicious repression of Burma’s countless peoples) to Apocalypse Now–surreal (an orange-robed Buddhist monk, cell-phone trilling, poring over a number of recent copies of Guns and Ammo in the depths of the jungle) to the amusing (recounting his language-mangling efforts to make himself understood, he writes, “I had only a smattering of Burmese, but even that seemed like a small victory over astounding linguistic odds”). Balancing politically charged tirades and thoughtful ethnographic descriptions, Marshall never loses Scott’s trail, though it becomes quickly apparent that he did not need to follow it to write The Trouser People. He describes himself with self-deprecatory humor, but all the same Marshall emerges from these pages as an extraordinarily intrepid traveler and trustworthy narrator whose finely detailed account will want to make readers hop on the next plane to Rangoon to help overthrow the generals’ corrupt, narcodollar-fed regime.
Excellent from first word to last.Pub Date: March 31, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-120-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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