A compelling but scattered study that requires a patient, highly engaged reader.
A complicated, ambitious survey of the Zanzibar dynasty and the scourge of the Arab slave trade in Africa.
In this teeming cultural history, former New York Daily News travel writer Bird (A Thousand Sighs, a Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan, 2004, etc.) focuses on two narrative threads: the Sultanate of Oman’s pursuit of the lucrative, slave-heavy clove trade in the 19th century, and the extraordinary life of Zanzibari ruler Seyyid Said bin Al Busaid’s daughter Salme, who left her harem home and eloped with a German businessman in 1866. Oman became an independent dynasty practicing a breakaway form of Islam that called for a return to its original values. Enriched by mercantile trading with the East, its port of Muscat thrived as a hub of the slave trade from Zanzibar and East Africa. The Arabs had been dealing in slaves 1,000 years before the European transatlantic trade, although the author argues that the Arab trade was much smaller—7,200 slaves transported per year until the number “jumped exponentially” by the mid-1700s—and more humane, due to the Koran’s more egalitarian tenets. The Sultanate of Oman managed to expel invasions by the Persians, Portuguese, Napoleon and the Wahhabi. Eventually Said settled permanently on the clove-rich island of Zanzibar, where his spirited, self-educated daughter Salme grew up in perfumed luxury. Bird is fascinated by the sparks and misunderstandings that flew from occasional East-West encounters, dwelling in particular on visits to Zanzibar by such 19th-century explorers as Richard Francis Burton, Henry Morton Stanley and anti-slave trade crusader David Livingstone. Consequently, there are many narratives that do not intersect, and each chapter could serve as a jumping-off point for a fascinating work of its own.
A compelling but scattered study that requires a patient, highly engaged reader.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-46940-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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