edited by J.L. Powers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2012
War’s most vulnerable victims, stepping up to have their say.
Seventeen wrenching accounts, most previously unpublished and either personal or based on interviews, from witnesses who as children or teenagers were caught up in wars or internecine violence.
From Marnie Mueller, born of non-Japanese parents in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II, to three pseudonymous young refugees belonging to the savagely persecuted Chin minority who fled Burma in the mid-2000s, the subjects of these essays range widely in age and background. They have in common inner wounds that persist long after outer ones have healed or, at least, scarred over. Except for Fito Avitia, a resident of Juárez, Mexico, determined to stay put despite his city’s wild tides of crime and violence, displacement runs as a common thread through these narratives. It takes the form of either physical exile or, in the case of Phillip Cole Manor, who writes of his tour in Vietnam and Jerry Mathes’ portrait of his father, who came back from that war with PTSD, profound damage to senses of place and self. Explicit descriptions of atrocities make disturbing reading in some entries, though all are, in the end, uplifting tales of survival that offer a mix of (as the editor puts it) “loss, anger, fear, heartbreak and forgiveness.” A romantic encounter between a Serb and a Croat, and a Kabul youth’s memories of repeated encounters with a smitten “Talib in Love” even add lighter notes.
War’s most vulnerable victims, stepping up to have their say. (introductory and biographical notes) (Nonfiction. 16 & up)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-935955-22-1
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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