Although some of these pieces are on the thin side, this is a fitting final flourish for a literary giant of the Latin...
The final work of the esteemed Uruguayan journalist and social critic.
“Writing is tiring, but it consoles me.” These are among the last words written by Galeano (Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, 2015, etc.). They’re from “A Few Things About the Author,” one of the more than 200 stories, ruminations, reflections, and proverbs, most just one short page, collected and published shortly before he died in 2015. Fried, his longtime translator, writes in a note that the author possessed a “habitual optimism about the human condition” and an “eternal pessimism about the course of civilization.” For legions of soccer fanatics around the world, Galeano was known for his magisterial Soccer in Sun and Shadow, about which he writes, “I wanted to help fans of reading lose their fear of soccer, and fans of soccer lose their fear of books.” For many others, he was known for his unrelenting and indefatigable leftist critiques of historical colonialism in the Americas, dictatorships, political evils, and social injustice “in the eternal battle of indignation against indignity.” These pieces, more rueful and reflective and less strident than his earlier writings, still reveal a man who will not sit by when he witnesses people “turning the world into an immense lunatic asylum and an overcrowded cemetery.” He skewers dictator Augusto Pinochet: the “man who burned the most books and read the fewest was the owner of the heftiest library in Chile.” For Francisco Franco, “killing was a pleasure and it mattered little if the cadaver was a crow, a duck, or a Republican.” Galeano could also be witty and humorous. When the stolen Mona Lisa turned up two years later in 1913, “it was evident that the experience had not diminished the most mysterious smile in the world; being stolen only enhanced its prestige.”
Although some of these pieces are on the thin side, this is a fitting final flourish for a literary giant of the Latin American left.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56858-990-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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