A disappointing account that insists on raising expectations, only to dash them at every opportunity.
Snapshots of western Africa, taken from the journal of an Italian writer on tour.
The opening of Celati’s travelogue sets the tone: “Yesterday, arriving at the airport in Bamako, at 2:30 in the morning, I stopped understanding what was happening.” Accompanying a filmmaker who was trying to produce a documentary on African medicine, Celati is the consummate hanger-on, blending the facts of his trip with lackadaisical observations. He’s an unapologetic tourist, a refreshing but sometimes enervating stance that leaves him free to breezily describe his surroundings—the rough architecture and cagey African townspeople, for instance—but can be chilling when applied with the same insouciance to an account of ten-year-old prostitutes. The documentary film all but falls apart, and Celati spends much time lounging under trees writing in Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania, paying as much attention to himself as the world around him. He manages to befriend a woman in Senegal, and his ordinarily bemused attitude gives way to a vaguely sexual tone; for the first time, we find him treating a native African like a regular person. The woman works at a law office and lives a social life that reminds the author of the coming and goings of a piazza (with cousins, French in-laws, and the like), a picture that begins to render the woman familiar to him—perhaps too much so. She comes to resemble an Italian more than anything else—and the author seems, in fact, to be papering over her real personality with a superimposed one. Perhaps this rendering attests to the author’s ability to treat her as an equal. More likely it’s a sign of his cultural blindness. The short entries, which range from three to one per page, make for quick reading, but they also create a narrative that only scratches the surface of a rich experience. Celati clearly intends to write like a tourist, a nomad, ranging over subjects, but his strategy doesn’t necessarily work.
A disappointing account that insists on raising expectations, only to dash them at every opportunity.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-226-09955-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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