A surprisingly fresh and acerbic review of Brazil's early history, first published in 1907 and now translated into English for the first time. Capistrano de Abreu was one of Brazil's earliest historians of note, and he has remained an influential figure in Brazil down to the present time. A variety of events conspired to keep him from completing the major revisionist history of his country that he had planned. Chapters is the closest he came to a lengthy narrative history, and it is some testament to Capistrano de Abreu's considerable accomplishments as a historian that it remains a deeply persuasive work. After a brief survey of Brazil's geography, Capistrano de Abreu plunges with zest into the complex and often very bloody history of the long battle among European nations for control of Brazil's considerable resources. First claimed by Portuguese explorers (in 1500), Brazil soon became a pawn caught between Portugal and France. When France finally ceded control to Portugal, the Dutch attempted to seize considerable terrain. For almost two centuries Brazil was the site of invasions, sieges and countersieges, ambushes and battles. Caught in the middle, and generally getting the worst of events, were the indigenous tribes. Capistrano de Abreu does an admirable job of piecing together, from very incomplete records, the likely course of the many campaigns. He's equally good in tracing the sporadic pattern of settlement in the Brazilian interior, and surprisingly modern in his interests: There's a sensitivity to the fate of the Indian and a subtle stress on the transformation of the environment by farming. His angry descriptions of the destruction of the villages created by Indians who had been converted to Christianity by Jesuits, to supply additional product for Portuguese slavers, is memorable, as are his vivid portraits of life of the Brazilian frontier in the late 18th century. More a collection of independent essays than a thorough review, Chapters is nonetheless a lively portrait of Brazil's harsh, violent genesis.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-510301-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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