Hard knocks for Australian “whitefellas,” though perhaps less compelling for American readers.
From native daughter and well-known feminist Greer (The Whole Woman, 1999, etc.), a provocative essay insisting that Australia can achieve political maturity only when its white citizens transform their whole way of thinking about themselves and their country.
Though she now teaches and lives in England, the author still spends four months a year at her home Down Under. Her confrontational message to white Australians: first, admit that Australia is an Aboriginal country; second, confront the fact that you were born in an Aboriginal country and must therefore be considered Aboriginal. Think of Aboriginality not as a race but as a nationality, she counsels. Becoming Aboriginal, to Greer, means acquiring knowledge about the land and the relationship of human beings to the land, the kind of knowledge that Australia’s “blackfellas” possess—or at least once possessed. The places, names, and specific events in Greer’s chronicle of Australia’s exploitive history will be unfamiliar to most Americans, but the story of unequal relations between white settlers and an indigenous people transcends the particulars. The author would have Australia recognize that colonization was a failure and that the republic must no longer act as “a puppy running alongside the US and Britain,” but as a leader among postcolonial countries. Looking to Australia’s future as “a hunter-gatherer nation,” she envisions not a stone-age way of life but a forward-looking attempt to work for sustainable development while preserving fragile ecosystems, precious water resources, and threatened species. Originally published last year in the Australian journal Quarterly Essay, Greer’s piece appears here accompanied by commentary from Quarterly editor Peter Craven and nine Australian writers, who variously interpret, attack, argue with, and occasionally praise the author, her ideas, and her way of expressing them. Greer responds to her critics in a pungent closing essay that further expounds on her thesis about Aboriginality and its value to a society burdened with guilt and suffering spiritual desolation.
Hard knocks for Australian “whitefellas,” though perhaps less compelling for American readers.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-86197-739-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Profile Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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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