A brave adventure grippingly evoked and featuring pertinent historical context.
An Iraq-based Northern Irish journalist ventures down the Tigris River through the fraught landscape of Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, and Iraq.
McCarron and his crew, which included British photojournalist Garthwaite, a Swiss filmmaker, a local river expert, and a Kurdish fixer/interpreter, among others, followed the ancient, beleaguered Tigris from the Kurdish highlands to the Iraqi marshes where it merges with its twin Euphrates, before emptying into the Persian Gulf. From the river’s source in Birkleyn, Turkey, the team ventured 70 days by car, raft, or rickety boat, observing the imposing landscape, exploring ancient historical records and religious lore, and engaging with the curious, mostly hospitable locals along the way. For centuries, the mighty, iconic river was the source of bountiful fish and the key to trade and transportation. Because it was prone to flooding, the Tigris has, in more recent times, often been dammed, submerging significant villages, such as Saladin’s ancient capital of Hasankeyf. It has also suffered from widespread pollution and, in parts, been “downgraded…from a river to a stream.” During their journey, the crew navigated checkpoints (“for the next few hundred miles, everywhere we would go had been held by ISIS at some point between 2014 and 2017”); and felt the effects of the simmering unrest in Syria and the remnants of previous Iraqi conflicts, especially when passing through Saddam Hussein’s birthplace of Tikrit. The narrative flows organically, delineating such daily hardships as negotiating with the police, as well as the evening delights of breaking bread with new friends in their homes. Garthwaite’s full-color photos, included at the end of the text, are vibrant and illuminating, and McCarron thanks her in his acknowledgments for sharing her notes and reading drafts of the manuscript. The book also includes a glossary of relevant terms.
A brave adventure grippingly evoked and featuring pertinent historical context.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781639365074
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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