by Jacob Dlamini ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2020
An important document in the history of the apartheid era.
A harrowing descent into the hell of apartheid via documents the regime neglected to destroy.
One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, and such people are made, not born. In the case of South Africa, writes Princeton history professor Dlamini, a native of a township near Johannesburg, the apartheid regime created many through its campaign of repression and separation. The rolls were extensive, the archives vast, and when the regime collapsed, the documentation was deleted in a “memory purge…so extensive that some commentators have called it a ‘paper Auschwitz.’ ” Officials with whom Dlamini spoke lamented that the paperwork was not hidden in a friendly nation such as Taiwan or Israel, if only because it could be used to prove who was a self-proclaimed freedom fighter and who wasn’t. As it is, in a project reminiscent in some ways of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Dlamini closely examines the surviving documents, including a dossier informally called, yes, the “Terrorist Album.” Begun in the early 1960s, it records the names and images of thousands of people who left South Africa because of their opposition to the government. “If the album has much value as a historical source,” writes the author, “it is because it allows us to look at each mug shot and, by investigating that image, find the specific account of how this or that person fled into exile and, by doing so, came to be in the album.” Some of the people depicted there did commit acts of political violence, but Dlamini turns up trouble with the discovery that the asterisk alongside many names signifies that the person in question was no longer of state interest. The album and the author’s account of it are charged with meaning, but perhaps the greatest takeaway is his observation that no matter how a government tries to obliterate the past, it can never do so completely.
An important document in the history of the apartheid era. (24 photos)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-674-91655-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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