An often scintillating but flawed depiction of the European domination of Africa over more than a century.
A history of “the transformation of Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when almost the entire continent became a part of Europe’s global empires.”
This is history written in the grand narrative style. James (Churchill and Empire: A Portrait of an Imperialist, 2014, etc.), a founding member of the University of York, takes on a massive subject and addresses it in sweeping, muscular prose. The author chronicles the colonization of Africa from the 1830s to the end of World War II, ending on the cusp of the era during which the reversal of these processes would begin. This is a fascinating story, and James displays solid storytelling skills. However, his perspective is thoroughly European, a view in which the vast majority of the actors are Europeans, with the Africans serving as victims, tragic but nameless. In an earlier era, the author’s approach would have been standard, and this book would have gone down as a notable epic history. However, we no longer live in that era. James is masterful in tracing the European-centered geopolitical rivalries, sketching out the leading figures in the colonial endeavor, and depicting the seemingly inexorable march toward conquest. He gracefully bounds from region to region and shows how the various processes of colonizing Africa manifested differently in different locales. He is less adept at giving life to African resistance and agency, and he occasionally resorts to anachronistic language in his description of African societies and cultures when he does address them. The bibliography also has some serious gaps—e.g., nothing by Basil Davidson or Martin Meredith. The maps at the beginning are useful, noting the boundaries of African nations and colonies in 1850, 1914, 1945, and 1990.
An often scintillating but flawed depiction of the European domination of Africa over more than a century.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-463-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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