These rambling reflections will be of little profit to those who have not closely followed developments in the former Haitian president's tragic country. Originally published in France as Aristide's exile was ending in October 1994, Dignity was essentially a plea for more of the international aid and support to which Aristide attributes his movement's survival. He expresses particular gratitude to the foreign governments and human rights organizations that condemned the usurpation of power in 1991 by army officers supported by Haiti's oligarchy; he writes movingly of the solidarity he found among Haitians living abroad. His attitude toward the US is understandably critical, given the history of American intervention in Haitian affairs and acquiescence in the corrupt and brutal Duvalier regimes. He lauds President Clinton's sympathy for democratic forces in Haiti but is candid about the deal under which Clinton's efforts to reinstate them were tied to Aristide's agreement to discourage Haitian emigration. For the most part, Aristide is excrutiatingly vague about the American elements that he largely blames for Haiti's problems, citing only the CIA by name. He is more open in expressing his contempt for the Catholic hierarchy, which he finds irredeemably cynical about Haitian democracy, from the pope down. There are fine passages, but they read like segments from oft-delivered speeches adapted for print, and the translation is uneven. A chronology and notes offer some elucidation of the period's complex history, but this edition would have benefited from an introductory essay putting Aristide's recollections and views in context and describing the forces and people at work in recent Haitian history. Strangely, little attempt has been made to update the book. Should be of use to future historians, but likely to disappoint the contemporary reader.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8139-1674-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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