A gripping story of a family’s—and a whole people’s—displacement.
A family history chronicles the life of an Armenian couple who were separated from their homeland.
Both Hovsep Madenjian and Varteni Sarian were made orphans by the Turkish massacre of Armenians during World War I and forced to flee to Beirut, Lebanon. Hovsep met Varteni at the orphanage that housed her, was taken by her beauty, and was eager to marry someone to perpetuate his family line. She was less impressed by him and particularly turned off by his blue eyes and Catholicism—two things she loathed. However, he eventually won her over, apparently by professing his allegiance to a more progressive interpretation of marriage as a partnership. They struggled to have children—Varteni’s first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages—but she finally gave birth to a son, Mardig Madenjian (Ravished Paradise, 2015, etc.), the author of this second volume in a trilogy. The first installment tracked the history of Armenians from the 14th century to the horror of their oppression in the early 20th, and this second volume details the tumultuous aftermath of the Armenian genocide and the new challenges that World War II presented. Hovsep and Varteni had their share of challenges in Beirut—overwhelmed by refugees, the city’s economy suffered and decent employment was scarce, even for someone as impressively educated as Hovsep, who could speak four languages. The author jumps seamlessly between his parents’ struggles to those of all Armenians; for example, he ably discusses the rise of the Tashnag Party in Beirut, the Armenian demand for independence from France, the strain that the Palestinian War put on Lebanon, the intramural disputes between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, and the impact of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Madenjian always expertly catalogs the aching desire of the Armenian diaspora to return home, as well as its diminishing likelihood; he also addresses their demand that their brutal mistreatment by Turkey be properly acknowledged, if not redressed. His command of the historical record is extraordinary, although he tends to bury readers under a mountain of minutiae; also, this is a nakedly partisan history, laced with resentment toward the Turks. Nevertheless, Madenjian still manages an unusual combination of the personal and the historical, rendering global events with the tools of novelistic drama.
A gripping story of a family’s—and a whole people’s—displacement.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2016
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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