A thrilling book that will leave you contemplating the concept of civilization.
A study of the Indigenous peoples on an island that “has almost wholly eluded” the outside world.
In this compelling account, Goodheart, author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, takes readers to the Andaman Islands, a remote Indian archipelago located in the Bay of Bengal. The inhabitants of these islands lived largely in isolation prior to the establishment of a British penal colony in 1858, unsurprisingly bringing with them a series of epidemics to the Native peoples. Goodheart focuses on North Sentinel Island, located at the southwestern tip of the archipelago, whose hunter-gatherer inhabitants have been particularly resistant to outsider interference and are often mistaken for cannibals. While the origins of the Sentinelese are unclear, their branch of the human species remained separate from others for perhaps 50,000 years. In 2018, North Sentinel Island drew the attention of the world following the death of John Chau, an American missionary who was killed by the Sentinelese when he visited the island in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. Goodheart recounts stories of individuals who have been drawn to the Andaman Islands as well as stories from his own two expeditions. He reveals disturbing details about the 1879 visit by Maurice Vidal Portman, replete with images that Portman captured. According to his diaries, Portman admitted his efforts to befriend the Sentinelese were unsuccessful and had in fact “increase[ed] their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.” Goodheart ably captures the mystery of the place. “When I started thinking about North Sentinel Island,” he writes, “I saw it as a place somehow exempt from this conception of time, a place that both was history and also lay outside history.” Nonetheless, time has taken a toll: In 1858, the population of the Andaman Islands was estimated to be roughly 5,000. By 1931, it was 460, with the Sentinelese perhaps numbering “fifty souls.”
A thrilling book that will leave you contemplating the concept of civilization.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781567926828
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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