A nightmare of crowds, fumes, and restless anger arises from the pages of this disturbing work—dour and long-winded perhaps, but ultimately eye-opening and perceptive. In Bombay, one must first find a place to stay; once that's done, it's possible to make money there. So say several of the Bombay residents with whom Naipaul talks during this exploration of modern India—an attempt to follow up on a yearlong journey he made there in 1962, to understand the changes his parents' native country has experienced since then. The problem of a place to stay in Bombay (or anywhere else in India) is a daunting one: astronomical apartment prices have led to "huts and shanties and rag-structures" that fill the city's nooks and crannies, single rooms housing families often, and miles of stinking slums. Such overcrowding engenders restlessness and sparks of temper—anger that, mixed with an economic climate that has provided some of the most downtrodden with their first taste of ambition and hope, results in an uncontrollable sense of outrage. Freed from the fear of starvation, sects begin to talk of independence and revolution. In the Punjab, terrorist Sikhs stage executions. Across India, low-caste housewives spend precious coins on "Women's Era," a mindless magazine that nevertheless respects their primitive level of existence. "During this transition period," a government minister explains, "we are slowly cutting from the moral ethos of our grandfathers, and at the same time we don't have the westerner's idea of discipline and social justice. At the moment things are chaotic here." Naipaul's book suffers from his own absence—much of it is devoted to recounting the life stories of men he meets—but his summing-up proves typically powerful (and surprisingly optimistic) as he suggests that India's emerging sense of nationhood may ultimately survive these inevitable, multiethnic, "million mutinies."
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0307739732
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1990
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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