An affecting story of an ugly instance of Western hubris, as told to writer Blume by the grandson of the man responsible for bringing Ota Benga, a pygmy eventually placed in a zoo, to America. Like so many others at the end of the 19th century, Samuel Phillips Verner was caught up in the enthusiasm for science, especially Darwinism and anthropology, which seemed to promise that a tidy scientific ranking could be imposed not only on plants and animals but on races as well. To this end, Verner, originally a Presbyterian missionary in the Congo, was commissioned to supply the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis with a band of pygmies for the anthropology exhibit. These pygmies—including Benga—were to join the famed Native American leader Geronimo, a Patagonian Indian, and other ``permanent wildmen of the world, the races that had been left behind.'' But Verner himself was a man of considerable complexity. Determined, like his hero Robinson Crusoe, to escape the safe ``middle station'' in life, he was also as a southerner haunted by racial guilt. He developed a close and warm friendship with Benga, who asked to stay on after the Fair was over. Delivered by Verner to the Natural History Museum in New York, where he soon became ``restless,'' Benga was then transferred to the Bronx Zoo. There, his presence in the same cage as an ape, along with a description identifying him as ``The African Pygmy Exhibited Each Afternoon,'' outraged the media and the public. Verner, congenitally broke, agreed to have local black clergy house Benga in a black orphanage. Later, the pygmy was moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, where, though he became a respected member of local black society, memories of his African past haunted him. He finally committed suicide in 1916. A somber cautionary tale, well told, of human ambition, arrogance, and ignorance unchecked. (Forty illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08276-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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