A pleasure for students of exploration, as well as for armchair travelers.
A vigorous history, by a sympathetic and patient fellow traveler (Letters from Egypt, 1988, etc.), of the long-ago efforts by European explorers to reach a fabled African city.
It’s still not the easiest thing to reach Timbuktu, out on a bend of the Niger River in the Malian desert. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans wanting to find the city, whose existence was barely a rumor to them, and to open up the Sahara to their trade faced more obstacles still: a lack of reliable maps; an Ottoman Empire to the east that instructed the Muslim faithful that allowing Europeans to pass by “is betraying your Sovereign (the Ottoman Emperor), your religion, and every Mahometan”; actively hostile populations fearing the presence among them of possible slavers and spies; Bedouin and Tuareg bands only too glad to rob and kill, and more, all on top of the inclement natural conditions and lack of amenities. Undeterred, the great botanist Joseph Banks gathered fellow scientists, scholars, and explorers to found a private group called the African Association, which would sponsor expeditions and, at the same time, work to abolish the slave trade. Its founding and first-generation members numbered some astonishingly accomplished men, among them Banks himself, the navigator John Ledyard (“independent America’s first explorer”), the young soldier Daniel Houghton, the gloriously named Scottish traveler Mungo Park. Later generations of African Association members were no less well credentialed, and many of them suffered enormously to accumulate bits and pieces of knowledge about the Niger River and the way to the African desert interior. Sattin’s anecdote-laced tales of their likes, and of the deeds and misadventures of dimly remembered men such as Swiss-born Jean Louis Burckhardt (who sagely remarked, “It is a less fatiguing duty to perform travels than to write them down”) and Gordon Laing (the first European known to have entered Timbuktu), are wholly memorable and, overall, offer fitting tribute to the work of the African Association in all its multifaceted glory.
A pleasure for students of exploration, as well as for armchair travelers.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33643-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
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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