A gruesome, chilling anthropology lesson from an unconventional instructor.
Sharp, lucid examination of Australia’s establishment as a white-occupied country, largely effected by the genocidal treatment and displacement of the aboriginal population.
Swedish historian Lindqvist (“Exterminate All the Brutes,” 1996, etc.) focuses his inquisitive eye on one particular territory: the flat, barren Moorundie, inconspicuously occupied for 5,000 years by the Ngaiawong tribe. Visiting the area in 1839, John Eyre deemed it “paradise…an ideal site for settlement” and promptly purchased 1,411 acres from the Australian government. “An unspoken condition of the sale,” writes Lindqvist, was that the land “was what was called ‘terra nullius,’ no one’s land.” It didn’t belong to anyone else in the eyes of encroaching white leaders, who countered Ngaiawong resistance with a massacre that nearly eradicated the entire tribe. Whites became the dominant force, led by Alice Springs mounted policeman William Willshire, who in the 1880s and ’90s executed without trial as many as 1,000 Aborigines, mostly for cattle-stealing. Lindqvist covers an impressive amount of ground in his characteristically dense, comprehensive narrative, which is invigorated by pages of illustrations, the author’s vivid dreams and chapters on Australian oddities. The country’s history, geology, botany, distinctive landscape, beguiling kangaroo culture and theories on kinship are all given their due. This lighter material tempers the grim descriptions of merciless carnage inflicted on Aborigines, forcible internment on bleak coastal islands of tribal women infected with syphilis by white men and brutal relocation of “half-castes,” fair-skinned, often mixed-blood Aborigines who were removed from their families and sent to perform manual labor for whites. Lindqvist praises the resiliency and artistic skills of the Aborigines, expressing hope that one day the Australian government will pay the “moral debt” it owes this long-suffering people.
A gruesome, chilling anthropology lesson from an unconventional instructor.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59558-051-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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