A highly readable and powerful account of an oft-ignored struggle and the lives it came to shatter.
In the wake of a 30-year guerrilla war, New Delhi–based journalist Subramanian (Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, 2012, etc.) explores the root causes and human cost of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
The author grew up in India, where he spoke Tamil, a background that granted him astonishing access to the Tamil-speaking people of Sri Lanka, where this minority has long suffered at the hands of the Sinhalese. Subramanian’s approach to the civil war is both a rich travelogue and a deeply personal series of anecdotes. The author spent time with a range of survivors, collecting their life stories and weaving them seamlessly together. Yet the political climate in Sri Lanka is so convoluted that most of these accounts end in confusion. Early on, Subramanian describes the “Grease Yaka,” mysterious figures who may (or may not) have been attacking rural women at night, and each faction blamed the others. This chapter sets the tone for the entire book, in which people chase shadows in an effort to comprehend their losses and rebuild their lives. One striking figure, Ananthy, insists that her husband surrendered to the regime and is still imprisoned somewhere, despite the authorities’ claim that the veteran guerrilla is missing or dead. Subramanian chronicles atrocities on all sides, from the Tamil Tiger revolutionaries to the ruthless Sri Lankan military. By the final act, even the author was spent. “My brain refused to absorb the news of one more death,” he writes, “as if it was just full to its brim and was now shutting down in protest.” His reportage is strong, but stronger still is his prose; Subramanian writes with eloquence. Sri Lanka’s plight is almost unknown in American media, but thanks to Subramanian’s gifts, the war has finally found its English-language amanuensis.
A highly readable and powerful account of an oft-ignored struggle and the lives it came to shatter.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06974-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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