One of those travel stories that reveals a heart as smitten with the place as the people.
Finely wrought though often self-conscious memoir of the author’s fulfilling sojourn in Japan, where she met three men who completed her sense of belonging.
Needing a change at 30, Abildskov left her native Utah in the early 1990s for an assignment to teach English at three junior high schools in Matsumoto. It proved to be much more than a career move. She found herself entranced by everything Japanese: the blue-and-white dishes she used, the holidays devoted to looking, even the pencil boxes—“I loved living in a place where people carried writing supplies in small, tidy bundles made of straw or plastic or metal or wood.” But, she writes, “I wanted to go deeper, I wanted to go inside the country’s mind, I wanted the country under my skin.” To complete her love affair with Japan, apparently, she needed to fall in love with the men who lived there. As Abildskov records her experiences teaching English to businessmen as well as teenagers, she also describes three men she met who enabled her finally to understand Japan more completely. First up was the professor, who spoke excellent English, and he and Abildskov felt a mutual attraction, but she backed off when she realized he was married, though they continued to meet in coffee shops. The second, a young Iranian named Amir, took care of her at a vulnerable time; the third, Nozaki, was the one she fell in love with. Nozaki stood out among the businessmen who attended her classes: he was more of a loner, read widely, and was interested in ideas (the others wanted to talk only about sex and golf). He was also single, and the two began an intense affair. Abildskov was tempted to stay on, but Nozaki, a complex man, was not easily pinned down.
One of those travel stories that reveals a heart as smitten with the place as the people.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87745-904-5
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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