New York Times correspondent Crossette’s tour of colonial hill towns is sharp, rooted in historical context, and smartly delineated. Ootacamund, Darjeeling, Simla, Murree, Dehra Dun—all are hill stations, draped like a high-altitude swag from Pakistan to Indonesia, relics of a colonial past that hungered for relief from summer heat and lowland disease, that yearned for a touch of home, for its architecture and institutions: club and church and library, brewery and boarding school and adultery. Curious as to how the hill stations were faring, Crossette visited 19 of them. Here she traces their histories, draws from a rich literature, interviews long-time residents, tenders her own observations as a journalist who has witnessed hill-town transformations—and the rebellions and environmental confrontations accompanying them—over the last few decades. There is promiscuous Mussoorie, “created for pleasure, not work,” and down-on-its-luck Darjeeling; she calls upon egalitarian Kodaikanal, a product of American missionaries in the Palni Hills of India, where snobbery and rank were irrelevant, and she hies to capacious Maymyo in Myanmar (which Crossette persists in calling Burma); then to the east, to the Malaysian hill towns, with Cameron Highlands soldiering on with its tidy atmospherics, a freeze-frame of times long gone. She also visits Dutch Indonesian stations—Bogor, Bukittinggi, Brastagi, each brooding and melancholic, pervaded by a “potentially violent unease” that Crossette finds marking current Indonesian society—and the French town in Dalat, its villas now being faithfully restored. Lastly, it is to doomed Baguio in the Philippines, a Poconos-styled American construct, now destined to become a golf resort. Crossette’s writing is quietly evocative, her research sprawling, her opinions right on the surface. She is mesmerized by hill towns and she makes their magic palpable. (10 illustrations)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8133-3326-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
