A thriller-like look at one of the harshest periods in South African history.
A husband tells the story of his wife’s detention and their daring escape into exile from apartheid-era South Africa.
On Aug. 19, 1963, police from South Africa’s notorious Security Branch entered a bookstore in Durban and arrested Eleanor, the daughter of the owners. This book, which won the prestigious Alan Paton Award, tells the harrowing story of Eleanor’s arrest, detainment and escape into exile. At the time Eleanor was dating Kasrils (Armed and Dangerous: My Undercover Struggle Against Apartheid, 1993), the book’s author who was the Durban Security Police’s target at the time of the raid on the bookstore. They hoped she’d give them precious information leading to the arrest of Kasrils and his colleagues. Little did they know that Eleanor had been quietly operating in a series of sabotage campaigns against the government. The book covers a brief period of time, reconstructing Eleanor’s arrest, detainment in a Durban jail and the menacing questioning she endured, her placement in a mental institution after she engaged in a hunger strike and her subsequent escape and flight into exile to Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana) and then Tanzania. As readers will learn in the book’s appendix—a touching memorial to Eleanor, who died of a stroke in November 2009—the couple soon moved on to London where they became prominent members of the African National Congress in exile. They returned to South Africa in 1990, and Kasrils served in a number of cabinet positions in post-apartheid governments. The book serves as something of a valentine to the author’s beloved wife and a useful reminder of just how draconian the apartheid state and its security apparatus could be.
A thriller-like look at one of the harshest periods in South African history.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58367-277-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
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