A welcome, readable history of a country that ranks high among the world’s economic powers but is too little known beyond...
A sprawling “biography” of a vast country that has always been much different from any of its neighbors in South America.
"If you steal a little you’re a thief,” goes a Brazilian proverb, “if you steal a lot you’re a chief.” A colonial power, Brazil was a source of immense wealth for its colonizer, Portugal, for generations, even if the colonizing class soon found that the parent nation’s “finances had been seriously affected by the high cost of running the empire.” It was always a kind of business proposition. As Brazilian historians Schwarcz (Anthropology/Univ. of São Paulo; The Emperor's Beard: Dom Pedro II and His Tropical Monarchy in Brazil, 2004, etc.) and Starling write, although African slavery had existed for a long time before Portuguese ships appeared, when they did arrive, it was with an innovation: that slaves would be put to work in agriculture and not, as before, in artisanal enterprises. When Brazil became independent, it enshrined its own ruling class, with voting rights extended to only a small class of landowners; it was the last on the continent to abolish the slavery that had made its rich agriculture possible. Some of the aspects of the Brazilian approach to life, write the authors, seem constant and remain “shockingly resistant to improvement,” especially the violent undercurrent that has always run through the nation’s history. Another less pronounced current is regionalism; in the early 19th century, for instance, some of the southern provinces of the nation tried to break away, leading to a civil war. Yet, the authors add, history is not necessarily destiny. In their youth, a time of junta and military dictatorship, the thought that a leftist like Lula or Dilma Rousseff could become president would have been unthinkable, and although “extreme social injustice still exists alongside democracy,” the country is making strides in containing corruption and smoothing out some of the rougher edges of inequality.
A welcome, readable history of a country that ranks high among the world’s economic powers but is too little known beyond its own borders.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28049-9
Page Count: 684
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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