Heartbreaking and terrifying: a superb account of the madness of war, and of a people’s wholesale self-destruction.
Breathtaking memoir by a young French scholar who twice managed to escape from the clutches of the Khmer Rouge as the Cambodian genocide was unfolding.
An ethnographer, art historian, and student of Buddhism, Bizot knew the risks he was taking when he arrived in Cambodia in 1965, just as the war sweeping through Indochina reached a fever pitch. But out in the countryside, he writes, things seemed tranquil enough: “The land was rich and beautiful, enameled with paddy fields, dotted with temples. This was a country of peace and simplicity. . . . Festivities, divine service, ordinary rituals—nothing was conceived without art, and poetry, and mystery.” All that changed with the disintegration of the Sihanouk government and Lon Nol’s coup d’état; foreign powers—Beijing, Hanoi, and Washington—converted Cambodia into a proxy battlefield, and the vengeful hillbillies called the Khmer Rouge set their awful revolution in motion. Captured by these guerrillas, Bizot proved a curious and difficult prisoner. Under interrogation as a suspected CIA agent, he retorted with Buddhist conundrums that drew on his wealth of knowledge about ancient Cambodia; for his captors’ enlightenment, for instance, he once likened the Khmer Rouge “reeducation” program to the Buddhist ideals of “renouncing material possessions; giving up family ties, which weaken us and prevent us from devoting ourselves entirely to [the people]; leaving our parents and our children in order to serve the revolution.” The Khmer Rouge were unimpressed, but at least they didn’t kill Bizot, who managed to get away in time to witness the fall of Phnom Penh and to organize an even more daring escape, this time with children in tow. Ever spiritually minded, he closes by observing, “I emerged from the Cambodian hell by crossing the bridge of transmigration. . . . I entered the land of rose-apple trees to be reborn into a new existence.”
Heartbreaking and terrifying: a superb account of the madness of war, and of a people’s wholesale self-destruction.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41293-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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