An impressively researched, nuanced, and engaging survey of a key era in India’s history.
Verma offers an in-depth look at India’s revolutionary decade of the 1920s.
Although most popular narratives position Mahatma Gandhi as the singular leader of India’s mass movement toward independence, the author aims to remind readers of the many other revolutionary figures who took part in India’s anticolonial debates alongside Gandhi. Indeed, in this book’s telling of the country’s colonial history, Gandhi was an exception among revolutionaries, as a string of more violent figures, including Prafulla Chandra Chaki and Khudiram Bose, were active in the British Raj. Verma makes a compelling case that the 1920s, in particular, were defined by a two-pronged approach to revolution in which Gandhi’s growing pacifist movement was counterbalanced by others who embraced more violent tactics. These approaches, which ranged from robberies to assassinations, sought to intensify mass disorder in the hope of making British rule untenable. However, poor farmers and workers who bore the brunt of British repression increasingly turned to Gandhi’s approach, which blended nonviolence (ahimsa) with staunchly anticolonial rhetoric that drew heavily on Indian national pride. Gandhi’s adoption of modest clothing, an austere lifestyle, and his rejection of the English language in his public remarks similarly broadened his support throughout the decade. Ultimately, though, Verma convincingly argues that both nonviolent and violent revolutionaries “could claim that they’d had a hand” in India’s independence, since part of Britain’s response to the violent tactics was to give Gandhi a seat at the negotiating table. Although the book’s historical details will be familiar to most readers, the author more than succeeds in his mission to challenge popular narratives of Indian independence, which focus almost exclusively on Gandhi while minimizing other figures’ work. The book’s solidly cited research is accompanied by an accessible writing style that avoids academic jargon while embracing Hindi terminology (a lengthy glossary is included).
An impressively researched, nuanced, and engaging survey of a key era in India’s history.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781834186085
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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