A riveting personal account and vivid exploration of Armenian history diminished by prejudice.
A writer returns to the Turkish city from which his Armenian family was expelled in this final volume of a memoir trilogy.
Madenjian’s (Ravished Paradise, 2016, etc.) father, Hovsep, liked to describe Chepni, a small city in Turkey, as an “earthly paradise,” a fond label for a place from which he was summarily expelled. The author was given an opportunity in 2007 to travel there in order to see for himself the “ancestral lands” Hosvep once called home before his property was stolen and he was compelled to start a new life in Lebanon. Madenjian wrote to the mayor, Huseyin Erdal—who insisted Chepni was the “world’s most modern place”—to procure a map and prepare arrangements for a visit. He was greeted by an odd mixture of warm hospitality, curiosity, and wary suspicion by the city’s inhabitants, some of whom seemed to believe he was there looking to recapture lost property or gather witnesses. But the author’s principal motivation was to see the “Forced March to Nothingness,” the road to the desert his parents were forced to walk into exile. Displaying an impressive mastery of the genocide perpetrated in 1915, Madenjian completes the history of the Armenians’ plight in Turkey he began in the first volume of this trilogy, sometimes referencing (and reproducing) his father’s memoirs from the ’20s. The author takes readers on a historically enlightening, if embittered, search for the reasons why the Armenians, particularly his own family, were so thoroughly betrayed by their neighbors. As in the first two installments, Madenjian’s unflinching quest can be poignantly powerful. His account of Armenian suffering is as affecting as it is edifying. But also following the model of its predecessors, the book inters readers under mounds of microscopic details, an informational burial that proves exhausting. Further, his implacable rage often clouds his judgment, the result of which is indefensibly broad attacks on whole groups of people: “I would be happy if not a single Kurd remained in the world. What did they bring to humanity until now other than misery and killings?”
A riveting personal account and vivid exploration of Armenian history diminished by prejudice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Armenian History Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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