Detailed portrayals of Filipinas in Hawaii that, despite occasionally weak writing, offer valuable information on an...
An anthology of nonfiction stories about Filipina immigrants, written by their children and grandchildren.
In this history collection, Brown (Kula San, 2010) brings together dozens of family stories about women who emigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in the first half of the 20th century. The author’s introduction places the memoirs in context, demonstrating that studies of the Filipino community have largely omitted these women’s experiences. There are common threads that run through these tales—traditional food, frugality, the practice of smoking the lit end of Toscani cigarettes—but there’s also a diversity of viewpoints, socioeconomic backgrounds, career paths and family environments. Most of the stories tell of women who joined their husbands on rural sugar plantations, but a few were middle-class housewives, and several pursued successful careers in real estate, fashion and catering. The writing is uneven, with some contributors producing far more fluent and polished prose than others, but all the narratives remarkably capture the rhythms and language of the Hawaiian Filipino dialect, with its elements of English, Hawaiian, Tagalog, Ilocano and Visayan: “No need go back! No need go backwarrds, always go porrwarrds! Why you like go back? You was derr already. Go someplace you neberr go yet. Datis how you learrn!” The stories are also notable for their range of attitudes about the past: few ever approach nostalgia, but not all condemn its world of plantation economics, substandard housing and tolerance for corporal punishment. All display how the Filipina experience shaped a substantial portion of today’s Hawaiians, which will make this book valuable to researchers. Although the book as a whole is limited by its stylistic shortcomings, it’s still a rich contribution to the literature on Hawaii’s diverse history. (Each story features recent and historical black-and-white photographs.)
Detailed portrayals of Filipinas in Hawaii that, despite occasionally weak writing, offer valuable information on an unexplored segment of society.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500539009
Page Count: 382
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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