A worthy companion to V. K. Arseniev’s Dersu the Trapper, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and other landmark books of the Far...
Extraordinary fieldnotes from the remotest fringes of the reindeer economy.
Ethnographer Vitebsky (Scott Polar Research Institute/Univ. of Cambridge) has long journeyed into the northeastern Siberian homeland of the Eveny people, who, he writes, “sensed that they were clinging to the face of the earth for a fleeting moment and wanted my book to be a record, warts and all, of who they had been and how they had lived.” The foreboding is understandable, and the book repays their confidence. Whereas the Russians of old had merely tried to exchange booze and Christianity for furs and reindeer meat, their Soviet successors had tried to destroy traditional nomadic society, imprisoning and killing the shamans who mediated between the human and spirit worlds, forcing the Eveny into permanent settlements, driving a wedge between elders, with their “1,500 specialized words for expressing human relations with reindeer,” and the young. State support for the Eveny, on which they were economically and psychologically dependent, is a thing of the past; the elders now fear that the young could not live in the taiga even if they had to. Vitebsky travels with old-timers along ancient reindeer migratory routes, marveling at the sophistication of those between-two-worlds people—many of whom had served in the Red Army and knew a thing or two about things like radios and tanks, others of whom were so well known across the vast reaches of Siberia that he likens one to Odysseus, “present even through his absence.” The Eveny world is changing indeed, Vitebsky writes, just as the world has changed for all reindeer people, preeminently the Sami, who show a way toward a kind of “reindeer globalism” that might enable the Eveny to sell reindeer meat as a delicacy to distant markets, export reindeer hide and fur and retain some of the old ways.
A worthy companion to V. K. Arseniev’s Dersu the Trapper, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and other landmark books of the Far North.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-21188-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
