A quirky, spellbinding collection that bibliophiles will relish.
Essays about the impact of books on a solitary life.
Pathan’s (The Reclusive Writer & Reader of Bandra, 2018, etc.) collection of essays analyzes how her favorite books and reading haunts in Mumbai shaped her into the person she is today. The 30-year-old self-described “reclusive, bookish introvert” takes readers on her journey as an inveterate reader, author, and publisher. She also weaves significant personal events into the narrative in intriguing ways. Some of the most profound essays center on a favorite book or series (Dracula, Archie comics, The Exorcist, the Tintin series, The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, Still Alice, The Hidden Life of Trees, The Holocaust as Culture) or a genre (she loves horror, the classics, Agatha Christie’s detective novels, and Robin Cook’s medical thrillers). Some stinging essays voice her disdain for the caste system in India and global injustices; others capture her human rights advocacy (“I am Malala”; “I, Phoolan Devi”). In the essays that form the core of the book, Pathan shares the effervescent joy that she experienced when she discovered special bookshops and libraries that felt like a true home and how she met a few kindred spirits—although she unequivocally states that she prefers books to people. In one single day, she bought 106 books, she says, and she aims to read 200 books a year; they are her teachers, her parents, her friends, her muses, and, most importantly, her refuge. She recounts painful life experiences, such as incidents of street harassment and expressions of derision from her father, so often that it may make readers uncomfortable—a brilliant and subtle way of relating her despair, her anger, and her reasons for retreating into the literary world. At more than 350 pages, the collection is rather lengthy, but the prose is so kinetic that it reads much faster than many readers may expect. It comes complete with a surprise ending that, upon reflection, perhaps isn’t so surprising after all.
A quirky, spellbinding collection that bibliophiles will relish.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Freedom with Pluralism
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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