A gripping account of a disastrous situation in the making.
A dynamic exploration of the geopolitics of oil that link Nigeria with its two biggest customers, Great Britain and the United States, revealing the corruption and poverty—and vitality—that permeate that oil-rich country.
Financial Times legal correspondent Peel, who served as the publication’s former West Africa correspondent for many years, calls Nigeria “a little laboratory for the arrogance of a fossil-fuel-obsessed world” and the Niger Delta region a “Mad Max world of roving bandits.” How it got this way is a long, complicated story, dating back to the palm-oil wars of the 19th century, when Nigeria was created as a state by and for the benefit of the British. Peel’s brief history of European colonialism in the area pulls no punches. His present-day report opens and closes with his intrepid visits to militants in the lawless swamps and jungles of the delta who are determined to get their share of the country’s oil wealth. In between he talks with oil-company executives, an urban hustler and warlord and drivers of Lagos's motorbike taxis and buses; he challenges police bribery; and he spends time aboard a U.S. Coast Guard vessel patrolling Nigeria’s coastal waters for oil-thieving pirates. The author’s message is clear: If the West is looking to Nigeria as insurance against oil-supply problems in the unstable Middle East, the bet is a shaky one. Peel’s vivid reporting reveals the systematic plundering of Nigeria’s assets by native politicians and foreign businessmen alike. While the alleged complicity of Western financial institutions in Nigeria’s internal corruption is not news, the author’s judgment that London is in many ways no better than Lagos is surprising. In both cities he sees the same disparity between the haves and the have-nots, with Lagos being more open and blatant in its injustices and abuses of power. In a note of hopefulness about Nigeria’s future, Peel asserts that its very newness as a nation makes radical change more possible than in older countries like Great Britain, where wrongs have been entrenched and concealed for centuries.
A gripping account of a disastrous situation in the making.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56976-286-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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