Windy but charming plotboiler overflowing with interesting details about Spanish colonialism, heady Indian mysticism, and...
Overlong and gratuitously sexy and grotesque—but also highly entertaining—finish to Jennings’s trilogy of valiant Aztec Indian heroes who use their wits, cultural heritage, and sexual wiles to turn the tables on the conquering Spaniards.
A century after Aztec Autumn (1997), Cristobal the Bastard, a mestizo (Aztec Indian mother, unknown Spanish father) is resting between bouts of hideous (and graphically described) torture by the infamously perverse clerics of the Spanish Inquisitors, who provide him with pen, ink, and paper to write his confession. Unbeknownst to the clerics, Cristobal is also keeping a secret autobiography with disappearing ink (made of milk passed to him by a lactating woman in the cell next door). This tale, then, written in milk-ink, begins with Cristobal’s uncertain birth to a beautiful Indian woman enslaved as a mistress to a disgusting Spanish landowner, his rejection by both the Spaniards and the Indians for being of mixed blood, his life as a thief and beggar, his twin apprenticeships, first to the kindly, defrocked priest Antonio, who teaches him to read and write, then to an enigmatic Aztec healer, part charlatan, part mystic, who leads him on a visionary return to his Indian roots. The evil Spanish grandee Don Ramon wants to kill him for reasons that aren’t difficult to guess. After Don Ramon in fact does murder Father Antonio, Cristobal embarks on a series of improbably picaresque adventures in Mexico and then across the Atlantic to Spain itself, aided by the flamboyant actor Mateo and the fiery feminist Spanish aristocrat Elena, who falls for him but is betrothed to marry the loathsome Luis, Don Ramon’s loathsome son. Just as the last line of invisible ink dries, who should appear at Cristobal’s prison door but . . . ?
Windy but charming plotboiler overflowing with interesting details about Spanish colonialism, heady Indian mysticism, and numerous puns and winking references to the picaresque novels of the period.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86251-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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