A richly detailed journey into Europe’s dark past and vulnerable present.
An award-winning Italian journalist chronicles his travels along Europe’s eastern frontier.
In his first book translated into English, La Repubblica correspondent Rumiz vents his anger at the European Union’s “rhetoric of globalization,” which homogenizes ethnic distinctions and threatens to obliterate traditional communities. His nostalgic, engaging search for the heart of European identity takes him from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, through present-day Finland, Latvia, Ukraine and Poland. “On my do-it-yourself map,” he writes, “there are no nation-states, only historic border regions that have been swallowed up by geopolitics.” In these regions, the author finds depopulated villages, survivors of mass deportations and exterminations that continued long after World War II. He notes that 9 million Poles and Ukrainians changed countries between 1945 and 1956. Latvia and northern Poland are “a land of ghosts and the uprooted.” In Belarus, Rumiz found only 10 Jews still living where once there was a thriving community. “Not only have they disappeared, but also the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Germans, the Ukrainians, and the Armenians,” the result of ethnic cleansing. History has left the region bereft, and the lure of the West fuels ongoing emigration, especially of young people. In Warsaw, Rumiz viewed ample evidence that the city has been “sucked into the void” of the “analgesic illusionism of the West.” He hurls severe condemnation at Italy, where, he asserts, TV and mobile phones have made people illiterate; where supermarkets with genetically modified foods have replaced local shops; and especially where cultural amnesia has revised history. Unlike Germany, “Italy continues to pretend that it was not Fascist and that it won the war.” Exploring the border between Russia and the European Union, Rumiz realized that he was traveling “a seismic fault that’s only apparently dormant” because Russia, under Putin, is becoming a renewed threat.
A richly detailed journey into Europe’s dark past and vulnerable present.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4542-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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