Unique, occasionally mesmerizing; loaded with esoteric historical tidbits.
Novelist Spenuzza (Lucia Zárate, 2017, etc.), who writes fiction under the pen name Cecilia Velastegui, offers a travel memoir unusually rich in imagery, history, and spirituality.
Spenuzza and her husband, Peter, seem to have been destined to traverse the planet. She was born in Quito, Ecuador, the great-grandniece of the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Ecuador. She was a child of privilege—until her mother divorced her father, against the cardinal’s wishes. Spenuzza was told her mother had left the country. She herself was sequestered in a convent school. In 1962, at the age of 9, she, her brother, and her sister were put, unaccompanied, on a plane to California. This was her first travel adventure, and the excitement she felt then presaged a passion for travel that she and Peter have shared over the subsequent decades. Not just any travel. Fortified with family legends and historical details garnered from the author’s copious research for her historical novels, she, Peter, and their two sons, Pete and Jay-Paul, explored ancient sites around the globe. They searched the Basque region of Spain, seeking out (and finding) the ancestral family home of Ojer de Velástegui, “a member of minor nobility in Guipúzcoa, Spain,” said to be one of her ancestral relatives: “he was among Christopher Columbus’s crew on the historic Pinta sailing of 1492.” Spenuzza’s prose reflects her emotional connections with those who walked the Earth in bygone centuries. In Turkey, for example, she rummaged through the Grand Bazaar for the type of cloths used by the Ottoman sultan’s concubines to keep their skin smooth: “I wanted to feel more than the fibers in the world-renowned Turkish towels: I was hoping to touch the desperation on the concubines’ skin as they shed their old layer and hoped that their newer and softer coating would ensure their sons a cushier future.” At times, however, the text slips into pedagogy, with lengthy lessons in art and history—not as much fun as reading about her adventures at Peru’s Huayna Picchu.
Unique, occasionally mesmerizing; loaded with esoteric historical tidbits.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Libros Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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