An incisive rendering of an important episode in the ongoing battle for the rights of individuals.
Thorough account of a major human-rights atrocity of the early 20th century and the man who exposed it.
In 1909, at the request of Parliament, British consul and activist Roger Casement began investigating rubber trader Julio César Arana’s operations along the Putumayo River in Peru’s Amazon Basin. Already an international hero for an earlier report on King Leopold’s mistreatment of indigenous people in the Congo Free State, Casement now revealed that Arana’s Peruvian Amazon Company, a British firm, had enslaved and committed horrible acts of violence against Peruvians Indians, who were forced to extract latex from trees for the lucrative rubber market. Some 30,000 Indians died in what Casement called a “crime against humanity.” In an unusually thorough investigation, Casement twice visited rubber stations on the Putumayo, interviewing British citizens recruited to work with the indigenous population, and viewing the stocks used to punish Indians who did not meet quotas. In this brightly written book, historian Goodman (The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea, 2005, etc.), re-creates every aspect of the “abysmal horror of the Putumayo,” showing how Casement, a great believer in “a gentler humanity,” worked with the help of the House of Commons, the British newspaper Truth, a courageous Westminster Abbey preacher and human-rights activists to expose Arana’s exploitations. Arana expressed astonishment at the charges, liquidated his company and continued business as usual for some years. No one was ever held accountable for the forced-labor operation, and Parliament could find no way to legislate against the same thing happening in the future. Peru and the United States, with its vested interest in the region, took no action. Knighted for his Peru report, Casement then began pursuing his fervor for Irish independence, even urging Germany in 1914 to support the cause in the event of its victory in World War I. He was tried and hanged for treason in 1916.
An incisive rendering of an important episode in the ongoing battle for the rights of individuals.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-13840-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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