After travel to far places, McRae, a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure gives his impressions time to...
A top-drawer history of recent forays into the controversial and uncompromisingly wild Tsangpo Gorge of Tibet from traveler McRae (Continental Drifter, 1994).
When the Tsangpo River drops off the Tibetan Plateau, it enters a landscape so forbidding—a chaos of high sharp peaks and sheer valleys—it might as well have fallen off the face of the earth. As such, it has quite a reputation as a visionary landscape where inner and outer landscapes meld, a power place with hidden, even paradisiacal elements. To enter such a land is to slip into allegory, writes McRae, who starts his sharp-witted account of Western machinations in the Tsangpo River valley with the 19th-century explorers and collectors who had their eyes on topography, orchids, red pandas, and Tibetan tigers—and only incidentally on ethnography—though they never made it to the inner gorge, the deepest ten miles of canyon where a colossal waterfall was rumored to account for the great drop in the river’s elevation. This piece of the fanciful doesn’t hold a candle to the mythological and cosmological significance of the gorge to the Tantric Buddhists, some of whose ideals and goals are “symbolized by features of the physical landscape,” but only for those who have flushed their karmic residue to access “a clear view of the mystical geography.” McRae does a gratifying job of explaining Tantric practice and how it related to travels through the region in the late-20th century by Ian Baker and Hamid Sardar—karma-fueled geographers from Oxford and Harvard—though spirituality had little to do with subsequent expeditions, which, as chronicled by McRae, ranged from nasty beard-pulling between free-booting adventurers and National Geographic–sanctioned honchos to a cheesy “siege-style, media-driven assault.”
After travel to far places, McRae, a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure gives his impressions time to mull and mold until they’re properly digested and ready for the telling.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0485-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
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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