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SARAJEVO, EXODUS OF A CITY

This firsthand account of the war in Bosnia is made all the more compelling by the tone, at once lyrical and detached, taken by its author. Karahasan concentrates on the city of Sarajevo and the tragedy that such a cosmopolitan, multicultural city should be forced to disband, its vibrant subcultures trickling out under pressure of Serbian guns. As dean of the Academy of Theatrical Arts at the University of Sarajevo, the author experienced the siege and shelling of his city. Yet he has chosen not to write a conventional memoir of the horrors of war. In fact, throughout this book (his first available in English), he writes about the futility of offering conventional witness and the inability or unwillingness of the West to understand or pay attention to the suffering of Bosnia. Instead, he analyzes the city itself, ``enclosed and isolated from the world, so to speak, cut off from everything external and turned wholly toward itself.'' He sees the city's layout and all of its constituent elements—architecture, demographics, even cuisine—as a series of tensions between openness and closure, an interplay of opposition and reflection, of internal and external. He also offers an impassioned essay on the ``misuse'' of literature to promote racial hatred and fuel the atrocities such as those committed against the Bosnian people. But the book is, predictably, most compelling when it shows the people of Sarajevo trying to maintain some shred of normalcy while the city is vivisected by the Serbs. Karahasan coolly reports on how his theater students react to the disruption of their studies, how he is prevented from attending a founding meeting of the Bosnian PEN Center. The book closes with a moving exchange of letters between Karahasan, who is in exile in Austria, and his wife in Sarajevo, followed by a typically incisive essay by Slavenka Drakuli (The Balkan Express), comparing Karahasan's tone to that of Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz. An excellent addition to the growing shelf of books on the ravaging of Bosnia.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-56836-057-6

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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