Gripping, stylish journalism that proves the modern history of Rwanda is hardly settled.
A veteran journalist challenges entrenched wisdom about the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Drawing on her years of experience as an Africa correspondent for Reuters, the BBC, the Financial Times, and other outlets, Wrong focuses on the repressive regime of Paul Kagame, who rose to power as commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel force that instigated the catastrophic civil war against the Rwandan government and armed forces. The fighting climaxed in the notorious genocide, a 100-day massacre of more than 800,000 ordinary Tutsis by the Hutu government—“an event ranking in horror with the Holocaust, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and the flattening of Dresden.” However, the rebels rallied and won decisively later that year, and Kagame, their de facto leader, has been president since 2000. Much of his legitimacy derives from a carefully honed image of “underdog turned moral crusader,” and he has been honored at the Davos World Economic Forum and universities around the world. With characteristic flair, Wrong uses dogged investigative reporting and historical background to show that Kagame’s regime is every bit as cruel and double-dealing as the one it sought to replace, spying on its citizens and exiling or murdering its critics. Even former supporters aren’t safe: The book’s title comes from the sign on the door of the Johannesburg hotel room where Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s erstwhile intelligence chief and later critic of the regime, was strangled to death in 2014. Such brutal violence, the author astutely notes, reveals the inadequacy of “the Hutu-versus-Tutsi prism through which Rwandan events are routinely viewed.” To label the event as the “genocide of the Tutsis” ignores the thousands of moderate Hutus who were killed. Nor does Rwanda’s spying stop at its borders given the regime’s blacklist of unsympathetic journalists around the globe. In Wrong’s panoramic cast of characters, the voices of those whose lives were destroyed ring out the loudest.
Gripping, stylish journalism that proves the modern history of Rwanda is hardly settled.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61039-842-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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