A breezy but nuanced road trip.
A New Zealand–based author offers a semifictional, meditative debut memoir involving motorcycles and Christianity.
High, aka Donkey, begins his story in Orewa, New Zealand, standing with his trusty 2009 Softail Heritage Classic Harley Davidson and a to-go latte. As he explains to the uninitiated, “the Harley is more than a bike—it’s a machine you bond with.” After some reflection on his parents, his upbringing, and his past marriages (each memorialized in tattoo form on his arm), he comes across another rider on a Harley, who introduces himself as JC. It won’t take long for readers to ascertain that JC is no ordinary motorcyclist; he’ll neither confirm nor deny that he’s Jesus Christ, but he certainly doesn’t mind talking about Christianity. Soon, readers are taken on a journey through New Zealand that includes episodes from the author’s life (such as a fishing trip to Lake Taupo on New Zealand’s North Island) and his questions to JC about religion (“I guess the fall of man really mucked all this up. Right?”). Overall, a lot takes place in this relatively brief book, which is partly a travelogue, partly an autobiography, and partly a consideration of what it means to be a Christian. High is at his best when supplying the sorts of details that one won’t find in other travel memoirs; at one point, for instance, he explains his quest for the right church to attend: “I continued to ‘church-hop’, trying to find a happy medium between the ones that bored me, and the alternatives, where everyone kept wanting to hug me.” At the same time, he also provides the finer points of staying at the “revamped Danseys Pass Coach Inn” in southern New Zealand. Although readers may find that many of the author’s takeaways about Christianity aren’t particularly riveting (such as the concept of Jesus’ “instant and future forgiveness”), his account as a whole is strikingly honest and forthcoming.
A breezy but nuanced road trip.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 93
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2017
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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