A globe-trotting journalist's harrowing rundown on the horrific toll taken by land mines long after the wars during which they were laid have ended. Drawing largely on his own experiences in Angola, Winslow provides both big-picture perspectives and anecdotal evidence on this ghastly threat afflicting much of the Third World. All told, roughly 110 million mines (anti-tank and anti-personnel) remain buried in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Israel, Korea, Mozambique, Somalia, Vietnam, and scores of other countries. Every year, these devices kill or maim 26,000 people, virtually all of them civilians. Worse yet, the lethal legacy continues to grow; guerilla forces are laying one million new mines each year, according to UN estimates. Thanks to their capacity to channel and contain enemy troops in combat zones at a comparatively modest cost, land mines have become weapons of choice for regular and insurgent armies. But as the author explains in his reportage on clearance crews dispatched by humanitarian organizations, it's a lot easier and cheaper to put sensitive packages of explosives below the surface of the ground than it is to remove or disarm them. Nor, as he documents in bleak detail, are the doctors and nurses posted to battlegrounds by private relief agencies able to do much more than perform basic amputations for those who survive a land-mine blast. Covered as well is the indifference of corrupt governments to the plight of innocents crippled or dismembered by accidental detonations, the dearth of crutches (let alone prosthetics) in areas where the need is desperate, the chilling effect of live minefields on once-bustling population centers, and the emergent Canadian-led campaign to ban the use of land mines. An eloquent case against ordnance that was characterized by no less an authority than William Tecumseh Sherman as ``not war, but murder.'' (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-8070-5004-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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