An eye-opening safari into the history and psychobiography of African exploration. McLynn (Burton, 1991, etc.) begins with a brightly colored sketch of the European canvassing of Africa, from Mungo Park's quest in the late 1700's for the source of the Niger to the successful penetration nearly a century later of the last blank spots on the map by German, French, and English adventurers. In between came a host of pith-helmeted derring-doers, most notably Burton, Livingstone, Speke, and Stanley. As McLynn sees it, all were driven by demons, from Stanley's sadomasochism to Burton's hatred of blacks to Livingstone's misanthropy. Upon this historical framework, the author builds his most unusual contribution: a thematic, transhistorical analysis of African exploration, covering in depth such topics as transport, the ivory trade, and the influence of imperialism. The impression grows of a nightmare continent of disease, warfare, and slavery into which Europeans brought their own cruelties and manias, at great peril and for little profit. McLynn provides fascinating, little-found information about everything from favored apparel (umbrellas, dark glasses) to porterage styles (because of the tsetse fly, domesticated animals couldn't survive in the African interior, so the human foot became the main means of exploration) to the eating habits of the black mamba. A close scrutiny of a few months in Stanley's 1874-75 transverse of Tanzania provides a case study of typical obstacles faced by the explorers. The blemish on this peach of a book comes at the end, when McLynn attempts—as did Fawn M. Brodie and others before him—to psychoanalyze the great explorers: Talk of mother fixation and other libidinous undercurrents sounds sadly reductionist in the face of these explorers' extraordinary feats. Except for those Freudian shadows, much bright light on the Dark Continent.
Pub Date: May 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-88184-926-X
Page Count: 390
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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