Inspiring evidence of the tsunami effects of a committed humanitarian.
A heartening follow-up to the bestselling Three Cups of Tea (2003).
Mortenson and his NGO Central Asia Institute (CAI) have been committed to building schools in the most remote corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan for the last 16 years. Here he resumes where he left off in his previous book and spotlights the extraordinary efforts to make good on a promise he made in 1999 to villagers of the Wakhan Corridor, a rugged, isolated area of northeastern Afghanistan. The Wakhan is occupied by the Kirghiz, who had been forced out of their land with the coming of the Soviets before returning to restricted migratory patterns, and are cut off from basic, life-sustaining government services. For Mortenson and his well-meaning, multiethnic crew he calls his “Dirty Dozen,” the village of Bozai Gumbaz proved to be “the definition of our last-place-first philosophy.” By enlisting the help of the local leaders and supplying the Kirghiz with necessary building materials (hauled by yak), the CAI fulfilled one of its main goals: to get the people to build a school on their own. Based in Bozeman, Mont., Mortenson tells the remarkable story of how his group operates. He travels America giving talks, raising awareness and enormous sums of money ($900,000 poured in after a 1993 Parade article), considering proposals about where next to build a school (it must be at least 50 percent girls) and courting local commandhans, or warlords. The organization had to contend with threats of kidnapping, Taliban violence, the Kashmir earthquake of 2005 and ingrained injunctions against educating girls. In his humble, winning style, the author writes of making peace with the U.S. Army, whose bombing caused enormous civilian bloodshed. Three Cups of Tea is now required reading for counterinsurgency officers, and Mortenson effectively demonstrates the “cascade of positive changes triggered by teaching a single girl how to read and write.”
Inspiring evidence of the tsunami effects of a committed humanitarian.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02115-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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