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DARJEELING

THE COLORFUL HISTORY AND PRECARIOUS FATE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST TEA

A thorough account that tracks the growing and processing of this fine tea against the wider changes in today’s India.

From seed to auction, a detailed look at the growing, selling and drinking of India’s “champagne of tea.”

There is no leaf unturned in Barcelona-based food journalist Koehler’s (Spain: Recipes and Traditions, 2013, etc.) exposition on the growing of Darjeeling tea. Darjeeling is cultivated only in 87 tea estates along a slender spine of land in northeast India. It is an “orthodox” black tea, meaning it is unmixed—withered, rolled, fermented and fired in the traditional method by hand. Since there is so little of it—it takes 22,000 handpicked shoots to produce one kilo of Darjeeling—in comparison to green or other kinds of tea, the prices it fetches at auction are enormous. Koehler explores the history of chai (Hindi for tea), from the beginnings in China to the surprisingly late (19th-century) experimentation by the British to figure out if tea shoots brought from China would grow in northern India. At that time, the East India Company moved into the steep, misty hills of Darjeeling, and the first British tea estates prospered. Koehler chronicles his visits to the oldest select tea estates, such as Makaibari, Castleton and Ambootia, noting how he began to understand what makes this tea so singular: the ideal climate and terroir and the “human element”—i.e., the need to be plucked by hand. Women do the plucking and get paid so little that absenteeism runs 30 percent. In a deeply researched work organized by the tea’s growing season, from “first flush” through “monsoon flush” through “autumn flush,” Koehler explores the initiative by some of the estates to go organic. Yet the combined crises of labor unrest, climate change and a political threat of independence from West Bengal spell a serious threat to the vulnerable Darjeeling tea.

A thorough account that tracks the growing and processing of this fine tea against the wider changes in today’s India.

Pub Date: May 12, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-62040-512-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Readers Vote
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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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