A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.
A surprisingly engaging study of an eccentric late-Victorian illustrator whose work “transformed [cats] from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names [and] personalities…of their own.”
Upon his death in a British mental hospital, Louis Wain (1860-1939) was a household name, but he is largely forgotten today. Known for his distinctive style of drawing cats mimicking the mannerisms, poses, and aspirations of Victorian society, many of his feline characters wearing the era’s latest fashion styles, Wain managed to eke out a respectable living for decades as a freelance illustrator for periodicals and postcard designers. Born with a cleft lip and largely home-schooled and retiring by nature, he had to support five younger sisters and an unstable mother nearly to the end of his life. His proclivity for cat characters emerged at a time when people in Britain began to shift their focus from dogs to cats. Hughes, a literary critic for the Guardian and author of Victorians Undone, is marvelously knowledgeable about the era’s famous cat people, including Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, and T.S. Eliot, and about the period’s massive societal changes. “It is no coincidence,” writes Hughes, “that the modern cat emerged during what historians call ‘the second industrial revolution,’ that period between 1870-1920 which was marked by electrification, machine production, geographic mobility, mass culture, and the fracturing of class relations.” In 1907, Wain traveled to New York to work on a syndicated cat cartoon; he was able to reinvent himself at the end of World War I with dazzling avant-garde cat designs before his hospitalization, probably for schizophrenia, in 1924. This consistently fascinating book includes a generous selection of Wain’s illustrations, which became increasingly bizarre during his later years.
A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781421448145
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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