After concise storytelling that’s neither romantic nor sentimental, Fleming closes with the comment that Laperrine and...
Fleming (Ninety Degrees North, 2002, etc.) profiles two distinct yet congruent personalities of late-19th- and early-20th-century French colonialism in Algeria.
After the Phoenicians, the Romans, Arabs, and Ottomans, the French came to Algeria. Bourbon failings at home, combined with depredations of the Barbary pirates and an insult to the French consul, started France on a course of blockade, then bombardment, then occupation of Algiers. Subsequent French administrations, writes Fleming, had visions of empire. Their occupying forces became “clichés of North African conquest: white soldiers huddled in mud-brick forts, awaiting the doubtful arrival of supplies, while disease and guerrilla actions took their toll.” But two characters turned the cliché on its head. Henri Laperrine was a freewheeling military spirit, not a rogue—“initiative does not mean indiscipline,” he noted—but an officer who understood that to fight successfully against indigenous forces, one assumed indigenous tactics (as the French would try to do 60 years later, in the Battle of Algiers). Charles de Foucauld, in evident though not so substantive contrast, was an absinthe-quaffing soldier/sybarite who became a Trappist monk. With the declared aim of “a deeper dispossession and a greater lowliness so that I might still be more like Jesus,” Foucauld took on the contradictory mantel of hermit/evangelical. Not that evangelism hurt the colonial cause; he was the perfect spy, ferrying to the colonial office information that, in the service of proselytism, tendered “a compendious list of ways in which the inhabitants of the Hoggar should be ‘civilized,’ ” or at least Frenchified and colonialized. The two were avatars of a process that would not become institutionalized for years to come, and even then it would be in vain.
After concise storytelling that’s neither romantic nor sentimental, Fleming closes with the comment that Laperrine and Foucauld would have little lasting effect on the Sahara—“They lived within the circumstances of their age”—but would be swallowed by cultural will, and the sand.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1752-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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
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