An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.
Five centuries of persecution and resistance.
In the 150 years after Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, the Indigenous population dropped by roughly 90%, writes Grandin, a historian who has written perceptive books about corporate and governmental iniquity, among them Fordlandia and The Empire of Necessity. Native people were enslaved, felled by disease, disemboweled with swords. According to the book’s conscience—16th-century Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, an early and outspoken critic of violent colonialism—his countrymen blithely tortured Indigenous children. English colonists committed countless atrocities of their own, and while Grandin describes these and subsequent evils in necessary detail, he’s primarily interested in the intellectual, political, and moral battles over what it means to be American. Many in Mexico and countries to its south, who’d “thought themselves Americans,” he writes, seem to have first found their self-definition challenged in the 1820s by an American diplomat who didn’t want Mexico calling itself Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Against this backdrop of contested identity, Grandin’s sweeping narrative leaves no major event unexplored, chronicling the horrors of slavery in the U.S., wars against Spanish colonialism in South America, and the CIA’s reckless meddling in Latin America. Grandin also spotlights lesser-known developments, such as the resentment stoked by the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt postwar Europe, in part with resources extracted from Latin America. The book’s most fertile throughline concerns willful moral blindness that caused incalculable suffering—and, conversely, principled opposition to invasion and exploitation. As early as the 16th century, Grandin writes, Spain’s subjugation of Indigenous people inspired England’s repression of the Irish. Later, God-fearing Americans considered it benevolent to give human beings as gifts to respected elders. More recently, Grandin details, Latin America’s intellectual movements—in literature, history, economics—proved immensely influential in their “persistent opposition to intervention and conquest.”
An authoritative history of the debates and brutality that made our world.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593831250
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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