Tiresome. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Australian journalist Kremmer (Stalking the Elephant Kings, not reviewed) rambles around Afghanistan and its recent history.
The author’s reporting skills transfer poorly to book-writing; a myriad of unconnected incidents cause fatigue, and excessive length sinks the entire enterprise. Kremmer begins in Kabul with the Soviet withdrawal of 1989. Mohammed Najibullah, head of Afghanistan's communist regime, tried to persuade Muslim rebels to remain loyal to him, but his security guard failed, and he sought refuge at the United Nations compound. The Taliban gradually filled the power vacuum. In 1998, Sunni Muslim militia headed by Pashtun sympathizers led the Taliban forces in their attack Toyotas into Mazar-e Sharif. Shia Muslims and Iranians who had helped the Northern militias were quickly executed. Taliban rule eliminated local militias, which benefited trade in the North by smoothing smugglers’ trips from Iran and Turkmenistan to markets in Pakistan. The Taliban’s religious police reintroduced harsh Islamic Shari'a punishments. Friday executions drew large crowds with Thursday radio publicity. Kremmer's driver fled to avoid punishment for his clean-shaven face. In the Koran, Mohammed placed a curse on men who created images of man or animals, so chess is banned, and in 2001, Mullah Mohammed Omar blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, massive stone figures dating from a.d. 400. Traveling to Iraq, Bremmer finds rapid repairs from the Gulf War and meets Abdul al-Sahdi, a member of World Championship Wrestling in the West (his nickname was “The Sheikh with One Million Camels”), who has been unable to return to England for seven years. While carpet vendors are indeed omnipresent, the rug trade fails as a useful metaphor or sustaining narrative device. More appropriate is Buzkashi, a game where men on horseback score “goals” with a calf’s headless corpse, players betray their teams, and the final, individual goal is to grab the largest portion of the deteriorating carcass.
Tiresome. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-009732-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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