“The relocation was an ill-conceived solution that was inhuman in its design and its effects,” the Canadian government...
No good deed goes unpunished. So discover the Inuit band that brought Nanook of the North to the silver screen.
At the outset of this vigorous work of historical detection by UK journalist McGrath (Motel Nirvana, 1996), Canadian outdoorsman Robert Flaherty arrives at Cape Dufferin, in the northeastern Hudson Bay country. He has been here before, having explored it for railroad magnate Sir William MacKenzie, but now he is on his own, making a film about Inuit life. The winter is hard, but sharing his hut with a young Inuit woman named Maggie Nujarluktuk makes it more bearable, as does learning the land through the tutelage of a man called Alakariallak, whom he will rename Nanook. It’s a promising setup, established in just a few pages. McGrath ably delivers on the possibilities, which include the inevitable and the tragic. The first category includes the birth of Josephie, Robert and Maggie’s son, whom Robert, a married man back home, will never see or attempt to contact. The second follows years later, when, in the interest of establishing Canadian claims over the Arctic in a race against the Soviet Union and other powers, the Cape Dufferin band is moved hundreds of miles north. Those who take pains to emphasize the Canadian government’s enlightened policy toward First Peoples in contrast to the Yanks’ murderous ways will not be pleased by the outcome. It, too, seems inevitable: Even as Flaherty enters film history with Nanook of the North, and later Man of Aran, the subject of the first starves to death and his people suffer every pain and indignity—one tiny example of which is that the government school established for the children years later contains only two books, one of them Roads of Texas.
“The relocation was an ill-conceived solution that was inhuman in its design and its effects,” the Canadian government admitted half-a-century after the fact. McGrath’s careful study provides ample evidence.Pub Date: April 5, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4047-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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