by Erik Durschmied ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
A remarkable sense of being on scene when the political process yields to paroxysm.
Reporter-historian Durschmied (The Hinge Factor, not reviewed) deftly catalogues facets of intrigue, horror, and chaos by placing himself as a frontline correspondent in a two-century span of sociopolitical upheavals.
At first his selection of events within the period seems somewhat arbitrary: what, after all, does Robespierre’s Reign of Terror have in common with the midnight rides of Pancho Villa or the nearly forgotten, tragically abortive little putsch of Rosa Luxemburg in the Germany that festered between two World Wars? Durschmied essentially hands the reader a detailed workbook with which to dope it all out. And it seems that rebellions, consummated or not, do share national or collective passions that invade the irrational and, at their core, personalities who are thrust into causes that demand utter abandonment of any consideration of human suffering or cost. Some—say, Stalin—press on, some accede or withdraw, but either way the results, the author asserts, are never pretty and almost always so ambiguously skewed as to render the absolute concepts of success or failure irrelevant. Beyond that, intricate cultural shadings and chaotic twists make each Durschmied parable substantially different from its companions. Readers who can stay with the myriad facts as they arrive in rapid succession are rewarded by moments that crystallize revolutionary pathos: in 1967, Che Guevara’s bullet-riddled body lies in a Bolivian schoolhouse while nearby some of South America’s poorest peasants, by choice totally oblivious, toil on. Che, like any number of self-anointed idealists bent on curing society with hard medicine, would live on only in the world of T-shirts. The final message, from Ayatollah Khomeini’s brutally retro-ecclesiastical Iran, seems to be that in programming themselves to have obligatory, nonviolent revolutions every four years, Americans tend to have a hard time seeing the other kind—whenever or wherever—coming.
A remarkable sense of being on scene when the political process yields to paroxysm.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-607-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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