An engrossing re-creation of an iconic encounter between Western Christians and traditional Arab culture.
A biography explores an American missionary couple’s quest to spread modern medicine and the Gospel through the Arabian Peninsula.
Dickason recounts the adventures of Reformed Church in America missionaries William Wells Thoms, a surgeon, and his wife, Beth, a teacher with lab technician training. The couple went to the Middle East in 1931 and spent their careers treating patients in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and, for 30 years, at a hospital in the Omani capital of Muscat. Arriving before the postwar oil boom, they found the region mired in desperate poverty and practiced medicine under the most trying constraints in hospitals that lacked basic supplies and equipment like X-ray machines, trained staff, sanitary amenities, and money for improvements. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Thoms performed assembly-line eye operations in the most rudimentary conditions while navigating fraught cultural tensions. (After resuscitating an 11-year-old boy whose heart stopped during surgery, Thoms was informed by the patient’s uncle that he would have killed the doctor had the child not survived the operation.) While Thoms wrestled with medical crises, he also attended to his missionary calling, delivering impromptu sermons—“I am not the head of the hospital. The head of the hospital is the Great Physician, whom Muslims call the Prophet Isa and Christians call Jesus Christ.” Dickason fleshes out this largely factual, though sometimes embroidered, biography with background material on the complex interactions among Arab society, Omani tribal and religious politics, missionary initiatives, and British imperial machinations, often conveyed through invented expository dialogue. At one point, a ship’s captain asserts: “According to Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, whose six volumes I have as my bedside companion, this entire coast focuses on one major activity—pearling.” The narrative is mainly an anecdotal ramble, but the stories are told with panache—“Then with a sudden roar, the full tsunami-like flood hit,” Dickason writes of a flash flood Thoms barely escaped—and set amid vivid, evocative travelogue. (“No trees or greenery softened the view. It was like a high-contrast, black-and-white photograph. The bright reflection from the water, the beach, and the whitewashed, adobe-like buildings almost hurt Wells’ eyes.”) The result is a captivating story of strangers in a strange land.
An engrossing re-creation of an iconic encounter between Western Christians and traditional Arab culture.Pub Date: June 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956060-95-9
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Van Raalte Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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