Well-deserved attention to a genuinely neglected minority.
On the road, beginning long ago.
“Gypsy” is considered an insulting as well as inaccurate term in today’s world, and this earnest account will deliver an unsettling education to American readers who are almost certainly unaware that a million Roma live in the country. Born in Romania and a Romani, Potter is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a passionate activist for her oft-persecuted people. DNA and language studies reveal that the Roma originated in India and migrated west about 1,500 years ago. Aware of the universal distrust of foreigners, most immigrants quickly adopted their new nation’s language, customs, religion, and dress. It’s no secret that this was a problem for Jews, but readers will be equally disturbed by the almost universal hatred that greeted the Roma, who maintained their own culture and traveled in caravans at a time when almost no one traveled. They were attacked, expelled, imprisoned, and even enslaved. The first enslaved people taken to America—by Columbus—were Roma. During World War II, from several hundred thousand to a million Roma were murdered or transported to extermination camps, including Auschwitz. Today most Roma are settled, but they do not have it easy. Their children in Sweden were not permitted in public schools until 1959. Although caravans are uncommon, stronger British trespassing laws were directed at them in 2022. Traveling widely, Potter is perhaps too focused on recording unpleasant encounters, but she is not shy about pointing out Romani celebrities and cultural achievements. Spanish flamenco is one, as are, despite the names, Franz Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies and Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian dances.
Well-deserved attention to a genuinely neglected minority.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780063337664
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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