Not definitive, but enjoyable for the author’s evocative response to a great city.
An affectionate, richly allusive tribute to the city the author first encountered in books as a child and finally visited in person in her early 40s.
Part of a series that links noted writers with their favorite cities, these are personal observations and reminiscences rather than comprehensive travel guide. Like many readers of Dickens, columnist/novelist Quindlen (Loud and Clear, p. 121, etc.) expected London to be foggy and squalid and was surprised by the quite different contemporary reality: gentrified row-houses face tended squares; notorious Southwark, once the site of the debtors’ prison where the Dickens family was incarcerated, is the site of the Tate Modern; and daylight formerly blackened by coal fires now charms with its “silver-gilt quality.” No literary snob, the author seeks out the houses in which Galsworthy’s Forsytes were supposed to reside as enthusiastically as she looks for the places Dickens immortalized, and though she makes frequent allusions to literary figures like Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, whose books are set in London, she doesn’t neglect such popular authors as P.D. James and Elizabeth George, whose mysteries often take place there. Quindlen pays the obligatory but disappointing pilgrimage to Sherlock Holmes’s block of Baker Street, where an anonymous office building now stands; she muses on the differences between American and British English; and she highlights the changes wrought by immigrants to the city as she notes the ethnic isolation of the characters in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, to whom historical London is a foreign country. She recalls the adolescent pleasure of reading the then-shocking Forever Amber as well as Georgette Heyer’s popular novels of debauched Regency bucks and penniless beauties. Quindlen is an unabashed Anglophile, entranced as much by London’s literature as its history; she mentions for example that the German bombardment during WWII destroyed Paternoster Row, the home of numerous British publishing houses.
Not definitive, but enjoyable for the author’s evocative response to a great city.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7922-6561-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
