A fiction writer who taught in Saudi Arabia and Egypt for five years in the 1980s recounts her experiences with balance, if not literary excitement. While Caesar notes relevant international events (e.g., the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the American bombing of Libya) and her romance with and marriage to an Egyptian colleague, she devotes her chapters to delineating characteristics of the cultures in which she lived. Topics range from intricacies of women's dress to Egyptian tribal beliefs about marriage to faulty Western press coverage of the Middle East to the accepted mistreatment of foreign-born housemaids. Throughout, Caesar successfully interweaves her students' comments on the Western books she teaches to shed light on both the Middle East and Western assumptions. Most effective are her account of the teaching of A Passage to India, which leads to class discussions of the moral blind spots fostered by political power (``shame societies and shameless societies,'' a student says), and Caesar's later ruminations on the US victory in Iraq and the World Trade Center bombing trial. In nearly every chapter Caesar observes, raises questions, and recedes as a character. This combination, plus the many incompletely developed supporting characters, results in a low-key, occasionally uninvolving tale, lacking the self-scrutiny of fine memoirs. But her persistence in examining and questioning Western and Middle Eastern cultures, and her believable embrace of some of the latter's elements and people, are what remain in mind when the book is done. She takes readers to what she calls ``a different world'' and helps them better understand and appreciate it—to see Cairo, for example, as she does, ``evolving naturally out of itself for thousands of years, influenced by other cultures without becoming an artificial imitation of them.'' Parts of this volume have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and elsewhere. A warm, modest work that makes compassion seem simple.
Pub Date: June 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-8156-2735-1
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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 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
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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