Mainly for scholars, although anyone with an interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis.
An eminent French historian journeys into the heart of Africa and returns with an unhappy report.
The Great Lakes region of east-central Africa was for years “a paradise for colonizers, missionaries, and so-called development experts,” writes Chrétien (Centre Nationale de Recherches/Univ. of Paris). Little known to the outside world, it became a byword for an earthly hell when, in the late 20th century, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi all but disintegrated in ethnic genocide, in part the direct result of colonialism and of a racist anthropology that favored some tribes over others: “The preponderance of the Caucasian type has remained deeply marked among the Batutsi,” one ethnological report from as late as 1948 reads. “Their elevated height . . . the fineness of their traits, and their intelligent expression all contribute to their being worthy of the title that the explorers gave them: aristocratic Negroes.” Chrétien closely examines such colonialist ideas, the misguided practical actions of colonial administration, and their ultimately devastating effects; particularly in Rwanda and Burundi, he notes, Belgian and French rule deliberately cultivated ethnic division just as it “curbed every form of mobility, urbanization, modern association, criticism, and imagination”—as did, he adds, the independent states that followed. Writing more for specialist readers, Chrétien also criticizes the historiography of the region, taking issue with hypothesized “Bantu expansions” and “Hamitic invasions” while investigating what can reliably be said about the rise of kingly states before the European arrival, among other matters. Readers without a grounding in African history may find these discussions bewildering, but Chrétien brings clarity to the interpretation of recent events, especially when he lays ultimate responsibility for murder at the door of ruling elites that “did not know how to construct or reconstruct real nations from ancient and modern heritages,” and that instead were content to produce an ocean of blood.
Mainly for scholars, although anyone with an interest in African affairs will benefit from this analysis.Pub Date: May 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-890951-34-X
Page Count: 492
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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