A gripping narrative and wonderfully entertaining reading.
A detailed account of British envoy George Bogle’s historic excursion to Tibet in the late-18th century.
In 1774, the East India Company sent a young Scottish envoy named George Bogle to Tibet on a fact-finding mission, instructing him to determine whether a trade route could be opened up between China and India. Teltscher draws on the journals and letters Bogle wrote, forming a compelling picture of his time in the country. What makes Bogle’s recollections so fascinating is that many of them bare very little relation to the job he was sent to undertake, instead focusing on the mannerisms, customs and wide-eyed innocence of the locals he encountered on his travels. Naturally, these locals were similarly intrigued and beguiled by Bogle, and he noted his uneasiness at being a “Specimen of my Countrymen” as the journey unwound. Teltscher (India Inscribed, 1997, etc.) details the month-long trek to the Panchen Lama’s residence in Dechenrujbe. She then pores over the finer points of the meetings between the two. The author clearly has a proclivity for the lighthearted exchanges between Bogle and his exalted company, noting that their conversations took in an eclectic array of subjects, such as crocodiles, watches and binoculars. As Bogle’s time in Tibet stretched from months to years, the author notes his adoption of many of the country’s customs—such as his love for wearing Siberian fox skins—and this behavior further endeared him to the Lama, who appeared to bestow enormous affection on the Scotsman. Sadly, Bogle’s dream of traveling with the Lama to meet Emperor Qianlong in 1780 was not realized due to his inability to obtain a passport, and so Teltscher brings her account to a close with a Bogle-less account of the journey and subsequent meeting between the two.
A gripping narrative and wonderfully entertaining reading.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-21700-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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