The transformation of South Africa from apartheid to democracy traced sometimes prosaically, sometimes astutely through the lives of eight representative South Africans. Goodman, an activist and journalist whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe and Christian Science Monitor, et al., knows South Africa well, from extensive reportorial stints, but the whiff of the slightly uncomprehending outsider still wafts through this book. He witnesses a great deal but doesn—t always completely understand, blinkered by his own cultural constructions and prejudices. Yet it is precisely this baggage that sometimes allows him the kind of unflinching honesty many native South Africans would never dare. He sees all too clearly the failed promises of uhuru (liberation), the promised houses, promised jobs, promised social justice that never quite materializes as the emerging black middle class focuses more on its own material well- being than on general uplift of the poor. In choosing his subjects, Goodman has cleverly tried to pair opposites: an anti-apartheid activist and the security policeman who plotted his assassination; one of the architects of apartheid and his radical grandson; a struggling black activist maid and a successful black woman entrepreneur; a white and a black farmer. When he is actively recounting the lives and struggles of these people, Goodman is superb. His portraits of the policeman, incapacitated by the horrors he has wrought, and the entrepreneur, an “apartheid jujitsu artist,” are first-rate. But he does not trust his characters enough to bring out the larger issues he’s so concerned about. So he takes extended detours into conventional historicizing and tired polemicizing, often reducing these usually fascinating flesh-and-blood people to little more than vague points of reference. (b&w photos, not seen
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-520-21736-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
