Though leavened by salty wit, this frank portrait of lacerating personal circumstances will make some readers marvel that...
Poet and performance artist Chin (Mongrel, not reviewed) chronicles a still-youthful existence lived—at least on the page—as if his hair were on fire.
Knit together here in roughly chronological disorder are a flurry of episodes from Chin's life. Though clearly intended to show off his crackling writing style, they are also highly illustrative of his human dilemmas: sorely felt and often enough laugh-aloud funny. The author’s upbringing in Malaysia and education in Singapore, standard fare for the place and time, seem pretty awful from an American perspective. He is badgered and caned, forced by a cruel aunt to eat his vomit, virtually abandoned at a school 200 miles away—then the relatives gather to applaud each others’ child-rearing skills. Chin doesn't flaunt this material, but he does let it drop and sometimes bounce: “We were living in a post-macramé age, and decoupage was the in-thing.” His fears, wounds, and punishing sense of worthlessness (“I pretended to be a snail”) come at the reader like rough surf; but what buoys is Chin's comic timing. The horrors of a family vacation are balanced by its absurdity; religious guilt and terror are kept at bay with a farcical exorcism; even his homosexuality is discussed with captivatingly fresh wit. Aware of his orientation at a fairly young age, when “the better part of the year was spent making deals with God,” the author can talk of a lover with disarming discretion (“Let's just say that my Horehound takes me to a place so incredibly wild and pretty”), then go low-burlesque and physically blunt: “Deformed nipples scare the shit out of me. . . . Penises are a different matter though. I quite enjoy deformed penises.”
Though leavened by salty wit, this frank portrait of lacerating personal circumstances will make some readers marvel that the species survives at all.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55583-642-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
EDUCATION | HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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