by Patwant Singh ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2000
The Sihks often reads as a folkloric tribute rather than an historical exploration. Nevertheless, it is an essential book...
A revealing, historical account of the Sihk sect and the rise and fall of the Sikh kingdom in Northern India that seeks to peel away misperceptions about this self sufficient, and dynamic group.
Author Patwant Singh (India and the Future of Asia, 1966) argues that, despite being marginalized in Indian politics throughout their 500-year history, the Sihks have played an important and undervalued role in past and present India. Formed in the 15th century in reaction to the injustices of the Hindi caste system, the Sihks defended India’s Northern borders to outsiders, held their own militarily against British colonial forces, and created a thriving agricultural society. They got little thanks for their efforts and were often persecuted and sacrificed in political power struggles. Singh goes behind episodes—such as the Sihks’ abstention from the 1857 mutiny against the British and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the hand of Sihk attendants—that have condemned the Sihks to be seen as a self-interested group, divisive to India. The reality put forth by Singh is that the Sihks have been an integral part Indian nation-building. He writes, “Had the mutiny been more than a mutiny, the Sihks would have played a key role as they did many times in later years when the countdown to India’s independence actually began.” He also makes the case that by rejecting an opportunity to form their own state during partition negotiations in 1946, Sihk leaders made “no distinction between ‘Sihk interests’ and the interests of a soon-to-be-independent India.”
The Sihks often reads as a folkloric tribute rather than an historical exploration. Nevertheless, it is an essential book for any South Asian collection, offering a unique lens through which to view India’s troubled history and current politics.Pub Date: April 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40728-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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