Perhaps Cocker’s fervent and entertaining prose should warn us about how readily we accept progress as an answer to war,...
A passionately written history of four episodes in European imperialism by environmentalist and journalist Cocker (Loneliness and Time, 1993).
Colonial explorations in Asia, America, and Africa made the Europeans conscious of their own prosperity and raised questions in their minds about the capacity of other races and civilizations to advance as far as they had. European judgments of their overseas subjects were conditioned by their own insecurities about stepping forward, of course: the conquistadores, for example, believed that their advanced technologies, weapons, and Christianity justified the extermination of the Aztecs, whose taste for human sacrifice haunted the Spaniards’ aspirations for religious glory and martial honor. After the genocidal Black War, and as the violent appropriation of hunting and gathering lands continued to obliterate the culture and the lives of the aboriginal Tasmanians, English colonists complacently wondered if the native inhabitants’ depression and listlessness were signs that God had appointed them to displace the natives. And even after they had ruthlessly corralled every Apache onto reservations, white Americans thought that the widespread alcoholism among the tribes was a symbol of racial decline. While Cocker attacks the idea of progress as a justification for conquest—arguing that even the present age is no exception to the patterns of the past 500 years—he insists that we must make progress toward a more fuller understanding of European crimes if we are to make native peoples’ history a part of our own. Whether they want their history to be a part of our story is a question that Cocker does not entertain. Nor does he hesitate to recommend as a cure the very concept that, by his own admission, led to the disease: progress. After all, the Europeans whom Cocker studies had no trouble adopting the idea of progress as a solution to the problems wrought by their bloody conquests.
Perhaps Cocker’s fervent and entertaining prose should warn us about how readily we accept progress as an answer to war, conquest, and genocide.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1666-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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