by Kathy Marks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2009
Thoroughly reported, but repetitive and relentlessly depressing.
The Independent Asia-Pacific correspondent Marks’s exposé of sordid sexual behaviors demonstrates once again that truth is often far stranger than fiction.
Pitcairn Island is perhaps the most inaccessible inhabited piece of land in the world. About two miles square, the South Pacific island became a refuge in 1790 for crew members who had mutinied on the British naval vessel Bounty. Although the case garnered attention at the time, it was a 1932 novel called Mutiny on the Bounty and two subsequent Hollywood movies that made it part of popular culture. Tourists occasionally visited Pitcairn Island, and outsiders looking for a peaceful existence sometimes settled there. It had a subsistence economy, although beginning in 1940 residents earned some outside income from the manufacture and sale of postage stamps to collectors. Marks, a British newspaper reporter stationed in Australia, became curious about the island in 2000, when authorities began investigating allegations by female residents of systematic rape occurring generation after generation. When she arrived on Pitcairn to investigate the allegations and write about judicial proceedings, the population had dwindled to 47 inhabitants, who did not welcome the press. Marks was one of only six journalists accredited by the authorities. Every day, she circulated among the citizenry, including the accused rapists, several of whom were public officials at liberty on bond. Even more surreal was her discovery that many women on the island defended the men, even though these women, their daughters, nieces and female cousins had experienced rough sex with the accused. Despite the overwhelming evidence of rape gathered by Marks, she continually heard the excuse that the sex was consensual, even when it involved girls who had not yet reached puberty. The various trials brought justice and psychological relief to some victims, but not to others.
Thoroughly reported, but repetitive and relentlessly depressing.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9744-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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