For 40 years, Davidson (Can Africa Survive?, 1974, etc.) has fought to secure Africa's place in world history. The stakes in this battle have been more than academic, as the commonly accepted notion that ``Africa had no history'' served as justification for the European colonial domination of the continent and its peoples. Here, Davidson shows how that historical denial not only allowed colonialism to take root but also contributed to the imposition of European-style national governments after independence. At independence, according to Davidson, a Western-educated African elite rose to power over traditional African leaders because it was commonly assumed that Africa had no indigenous models for ruling nation-states. Gathering the historical evidence, Davidson shows that, before the imposition of colonialism in the late 19th century, Africa was well along in the process of evolving its own models for the nation-state. The Asante kingdom of modern- day Ghana, for example, was ``manifestly a national state on its way to becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a Western European nation-state.'' Historians, though, neglected or were unaware of Africa's rich political history; and so Davidson portrays an Africa stripped of tradition. Africans under colonialism were told that, in order to be civilized, they must cease being African—while at the same time they could never be European. Ironically, this view didn't change after independence, with adherence to African tradition still derided as ``tribalism'' and seen as an obstacle to development. What Africa's leaders inherited, says Davidson, was ``a crisis of social disintegration.'' From here he charts the plummeting spiral of economic and social decay that has brought Africa to its current political crisis. Davidson's reach extends through medieval Europe, 19th-century Japan, and to the quandary faced by Eastern European nations today. He offers a rich and fascinating history, essential for any understanding of modern Africa's troubles—and a welcome contrast to the blame-the-Africans-for-their-problems books that have proliferated in the past decade.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8129-1998-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
HISTORY | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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