Shukman tells us what he did on his summer vacation in the wilds of New Mexico. Shukman (Travels with My Trombone, 1993, etc.) closes his loosely connected trilogy of books on travels in Latin America with this report of a sojourn in Spain's northernmost outpost in the New World. The writing is competent, but the adventures Shukman reports are a bit humdrum, and playing the daffy foreign tourist in cowboy bars and having dreams of being given secret names by mysterious Indians are clichÇs of the southwestern travel genre. As he wanders by bus from Alamogordo to Taos, from Socorro to Las Vegas, he nurses memories of lost love, engages in a tryst with an Italian tourist, goes trout fishing with a well-connected movie producer, and visits with the Buddhist sage and writer Natalie Goldberg—episodes that are all meaningful to the author, of course, but that are not rendered with enough force or novelty to make the narrative especially meaningful to others. Many Southwesterners will feel, too, that Shukman hasn't quite got the details right (New Mexicans don't say ``youse'' for the second person, to note one small example). As befits a British traveler in the region, Shukman often invokes the spirit of D.H. Lawrence, whom he pegs as ``an uneasy sick man with an eye to his public image.'' Shukman writes well and easily about his life on familiar ground—his memories of the hippie ethos of early 1970s England are a hoot—and as the book progresses he clearly becomes more assured about his observations and has more interesting things to say about being ``on the road in America.'' Ultimately, he emerges as a sympathetic and likable character. Still, readers familiar with New Mexico won't learn anything new here, and those who are unfamiliar with the area won't likely follow Shukman's idiosyncratic route across the Land of Enchantment.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56836-170-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
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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