A British journalist takes a probing, critical look at economic and moral decline in post-independence Jamaica.
With a similar literary travelogue under his belt about the troubled island of Haiti, Thomson (Primo Levi: A Life, 2003, etc.) now sets his sights on Jamaica, once a paradisiacal resort area, not to mention the birthplace of reggae music, now a down-at-the-heel tropical haven for drug warlords, violence and general infrastructural entropy. The author adroitly combines historical research with his personal observations made while traveling through Jamaica’s embattled neighborhoods. Thomson interviewed mostly older conservative Jamaicans, many of whom are either middle class or members of the local clergy. Most of the interviewees attribute Jamaica’s decline to narrow-mindedness, laziness and a detrimental American influence overtaking the culture. Some of them feel that Jamaica was better off as a British colony. It would be unfair to say that Thomson voices his damning opinion on Jamaica through his one-sided choice of source material, but his own Anglo schoolmasterish disapproval comes through clearly enough. Still, as appalled as he is by the state of things in today’s Jamaica, the author has the good judgment to avoid any suggestion that Jamaica would be better off as an American or British protectorate. The real worth of Thomson’s study are the chapters devoted to the lesser-known but prominent ethnic groups in Jamaica—Jamaican Jews, “Eastern” Indians and Chinese, among others—who’ve played an important, largely obscure role in shaping the island’s history. The author also outlines the inconsistent local politics that have shaped post-independence Jamaica, most notably the left-wing revolutionary leader Michael Manley’s “glamorous failure” to curtail political violence and unite the country’s antagonistic black/white ethnic divide. A broadly informative cultural investigation despite its inherently biased perspective.
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56858-656-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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