The author’s vivid details of South Africa’s persistent racism, abject poverty, and continuing oppression are undermined by...
Unraveling a web of evidence in a notorious murder.
After moving to South Africa for her husband’s work, van der Leun (Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love, 2010) became fascinated by the story of Amy Biehl, an American Fulbright scholar who was brutally murdered—stoned and stabbed—in Cape Town in 1993. Four years later, with apartheid ended, the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation program was put in place. This “experiment in restorative justice” offered “release and a clean slate to those, who, upon taking responsibility, fully, and honestly, for their apartheid-era crimes, could prove that their misdeeds were politically motivated.” Among those who came forward were two men convicted for Amy’s murder, and prominent among those who forgave were Amy’s parents. The Biehls set up a foundation in Amy’s name to further the study of democracy and gender rights, and they gave jobs to the two men whom they embraced. The author’s initial interest was the Biehls, whose gesture made them celebrities in South Africa and the U.S. She wanted to understand how they could forgive—and forge a close relationship with—the murderers. But soon her focus shifted to the crime itself, which seemed to be far more complicated than what she gleaned from official documents. She repeatedly interviewed Easy, the most voluble of the convicted men, retracing the events leading to Amy’s death, Easy’s youth, and the volatile politics of the time. “I felt like a kid who wants to hear the same bedtime story again and again: for comfort, or to better understand, or maybe hoping that this time some detail would shift to reveal a new, improved tale,” she writes. Unfortunately, reiterating the story over and over results in a tedious narrative and revelations less surprising than she implies.
The author’s vivid details of South Africa’s persistent racism, abject poverty, and continuing oppression are undermined by unnecessary repetition.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9450-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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