Next book

THE FATE OF AFRICA

TRIAL BY FIRE

A series of set-pieces that graphically illustrate—but less successfully illuminate—the terrible tangle of ancient legacies and contemporary politics that threaten Africa. Harding (a British journalist who's both traveled and lived in Africa) writes about six very disparate and far-flung countries that share a common challenge of having to make themselves anew in the post-cold-war world: countries like Mozambique and Angola, which must not only restructure their economies to meet the requirements of the World Bank but also deal with the tremendous dislocation of people and production war has caused. Harding begins with Angola, still at war after 30 years, as rebel commander Jonas Savimbi refuses to accept the results of the recent elections. Namibia is next, newly independent after a 24-year war, bustling despite the scars: ``Everywhere you looked there was energy''—an energy that's also visible in Western Sahara, where the Polisario liberation movement is still fighting for independence from Morocco and where, in refugee camps, generations of nomads are trying to grow food in soil that's as salty as the water. In South Africa, the author's focus is the on-going violence in the townships, violence that's making it ``harder and more dangerous to get to work.'' Harding finds that Mozambique, despite peacemaking attempts, is still ravaged by bands of soldiers, and he takes as his final subject Eritrea, finally independent after a long war against Ethiopia, though a quarter of million people remain in Sudanese refugee camps. In each country, Harding visits battle fields, talks to victims of war, and notes everywhere the legacy of destroyed landscapes and economies. Harding's empathy for his subjects' suffering is creditable, but their fate, as well as that of the continent he so obviously loves, get losts in a text that wanders, jumps, and never quite gets in focus. (Maps)

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1993

ISBN: 0-671-72359-6

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

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

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • 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

Next book

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

Close Quickview