Everything you ever wanted to know about samba and the kindred sounds of Brazil, told with the neurotic hipness that leavens Krich's best writing (El BÇisbol, 1989, etc.). Krich serves up a tour de force through Brazilian popular music. Apparently he's has managed to talk with every composer and musician in the country—a motley crew of picaresques, deadbeats, eccentrics, geniuses, and just plain guys. From Sao Paulo to Rio, Recife, and Amazonas, style after musical style is drunk from: bossa nova, chorinho, lundu, trio electrico. But it's irreverent samba that captures Krich's heart. However far he wanders in pursuit of the peculiar and the telling detail (Krich is a lover of the odd fact and the strange encounter)—checking into the pedigrees of various high priests and goddesses, exploring the nether regions of mysticism, tracking down the inventor of the lambada—samba exerts enough gravitational force to pull him back into its spirited, high-stepping world. Krich is a student of the places he visits: Substantial doses of Brazilian history and landscape provide a context for the music and a shape to the country. A few short intermezzos serve as bridges between sections of the narrative—little dreamscapes often delivered with the creepiness of a sideshow barker—and each chapter comes equipped with a discography. You either warm to Krich's style or are quickly put off by it. It's aswarm with anxieties and prone to complaint, but intrepid, clever, informed, and pleasantly goofy. As polyrhythmic as Carnival itself: an artful blend of music, politics, and the land; a maelstrom of sounds and images from which Krich concocts an intriguing picture of Brazil.
Pub Date: Feb. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-76814-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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