A well-written, personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our lives.
A personal story bound up in six centuries of Black European history.
After his stepfather’s death, Arena returned from his birthplace and home in Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa, to Portugal, the country where he grew up. Chronicling his explorations of Lisbon and the surrounding landscape, the author weaves among the arcs of his personal history and the histories of Black lives at the heart of European empire. Arena, a journalist by trade, is particularly interested in people whose “life stories were rescued from oblivion by the miracles of literature—eventually by biographers, but initially through works of family fiction.” He pursues the family history of his friend Leopoldina, whose enslaved ancestors rebelled against their oppression in Portugal. Alongside such intimate sagas are brief biographies of Black people who, despite rigid and racist social structures, rose to great prominence in the white Western world. These stories often draw on the unlikely immortality of literary success; their subjects include Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of the great French novelist; and Abraham Petrovitch Gannibal, confidante of Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather. Arena also has a gift for lyrical object history. The book opens with a close reading of a technically “mediocre” but informationally rich 16th-century painting of a fountain where Lisbon’s African population—enslaved and free alike—gathered. Later, visiting the site of the fountain, Arena reflects on the continuities of history and place, the relation of the scene around him to the one depicted in paint: “My ancestral trajectory was both personal and typical—one more family of Cape Verdean immigrants—and how, in some abstract way, perhaps through that sense of melancholy we Portuguese speakers call saudade, my own journey was connected to that first voyage, in 1444, when 235 Africans were brought to Portugal with shackles on their feet.”
A well-written, personal saga that acknowledges the resonance of historical identity, art, and literature in our lives.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781951213527
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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