Moorhouse is a crackerjack travel writer and storyteller, and he has impeccable timing: Sydney will host the 27th Olympiad...
A keen tour of Sydney, Australia—streetwise and savvy, both culturally and historically—from Moorhouse (Sun Dancing, 1997, etc.).
The town named Sydney may have risen where the first convict ships from Britain hove into the glorious natural harbor, but the aboriginal population was there well ahead of them. Moorhouse begins his story with the Aborigines, by way of their Dreaming and artwork and their precarious survival, disavowing anything more than the briefest of introductions but delivering a respectful measure more. Taking the role of observer—though he is more than happy to sample the city’s food and beverages and skim the waters of Tank Stream and the harbor—Moorhouse’s sedate and ever-so melancholy voice moves on to touch all over Sydney’s history and landscape. He recounts the sorry years of the town as a penal colony, the joys of its Botanic Gardens; he delves into institutionalized racism and the bullying of the church in secular life. He takes readers on a slow ramble through the remnants of a gracefully proportioned cityscape that early learned to separate home and industry and put the emphasis on greenery, which only recently and with unfortunate results has “taken a back seat to the needs of capital” in the form of tacky high-rise financial buildings. He explains the importance of cricket and horse racing, the theater and opera and the public library. But most of all he sings the praises of the city’s fine, safe harbor. It is a waterscape that has smitten Moorhouse, a shimmering world that is the final reference point to the land that surrounds it, a working harbor that is still a valued presence when many cities have come to shun their watery origins.
Moorhouse is a crackerjack travel writer and storyteller, and he has impeccable timing: Sydney will host the 27th Olympiad this summer, which ought to spur plenty of interest in the city.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-100601-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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