Karttunen (Anthropology/Linguistic Research Center, Univ. of Texas) has identified a fascinating topic in the lives and roles of interpreters, guides, and informants to missionaries, explorers, soldiers: world-bridging mediators, the ultimate aliens. Using the languages she knows and works that have survived, Karttunen presents not theory or symbols but life stories, nine in detail, seven more briefly. Dividing these into three major groups- -the guides, the civil servants, and the informants or wordsmiths- -she ranges from the earliest explorers to contemporary drug culture: the familiar Ishi, the last surviving Yahi Indian; Do§a Marina, interpreter for Cortes in his conquest of Mexico; Sacajawea, who guided Lewis and Clark over the Continental Divide; Sarah Winnemucca, who started as a US Army Scout in the 19th century and became a lobbyist for her Native American tribe; Gaspar Antonio Chi, a 16th-century Inca who recorded the destruction of his culture; and Charles Eastman, the Sioux physician at Wounded Knee whose legacy is in the ceremonies of the Boy Scouts and the Campfire Girls. The three major native informants are especially interesting, though hardly representative of their cultures: Larin Paraske, a pitiful 19th-century migrant Finnish poet; Do§a Luz Jimenez, model for Diego Rivera, who embodied the spirit of Mexico in his paintings and murals; and Maria Sabina, the Mazatec mushroom shaman exploited by the drug cults of the 60's. Though the book is never overtly moralistic, exploitation is its theme—the terrible price these unusual figures played for being the messengers, the spokespeople. As Karttunen skillfully represents them, their lives- -and the lives of their children—are all poignant, if not tragic. Even without a theory to explain them, these figures form a memorable group, the admonishing statues in abandoned temples. Would make a great PBS documentary.
Pub Date: March 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-8135-2030-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
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