A brilliant account of a broken land, one that certainly deserves the attention this excellent book brings.
A somber, eye-opening journey into the definitive heart of darkness.
Joseph Conrad is the tutelary spirit of this work by Daily Telegraph correspondent Butcher, who for years “had stared at maps dominated by the Congo River, a silver-bladed sickle, its handle anchored on the coasts, its tip buried deep in the equatorial forest” and, emphatically without the approval of his newspaper employer, decided to travel the 3,000-odd-mile length of the river. Conrad may be the spirit, but the book’s more literal guide is the 19th-century adventurer Henry Stanley, as miscreant an imperialist as ever there was. Half a century ago, Butcher’s mother made the voyage down the Congo, but that was before the country had disintegrated into postcolonial civil war and what Butcher, quoting her, refers to as “a great deal of ‘beastliness.’ ” An ardent student of history and culture, Butcher could find no single expert, before undertaking his voyage, who could make sense of the entire country. After his trip, so eloquently described here, he may be the only Western journalist with such a handle on that vast region. His book is of tremendous use to geographers, development specialists and humanitarian aid workers, as well as armchair travelers. One thing he turns up almost immediately is the impossibility of domestic harmony in a land where local government is impossible. As one of his interlocutors, a town mayor, says, “I can pay no civil servants because I have no money and there is no bank or post office where money could be received, and we have no civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not work.” Nonetheless, Butcher finds a few rays of hope even in a place where, by his reckoning, about 1,200 lives a day are lost in a civil war that the international community seems to consider “a lost cause without hope of ever being put right.”
A brilliant account of a broken land, one that certainly deserves the attention this excellent book brings.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1877-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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