Brash, breezy, and subversively irreverent: Zamoyski makes sausage out of Lafayette, Rousseau, Marx, Bolivar, and other...
A lively, witty whirlwind tour of a calamitous century when Europe and so much of the rest of the world was up in arms, from Polish historian and biographer Zamoyski (Chopin, not reviewed).
To call this maxi-history shallow seems unfair: Zamoyski’s piquant, frequently hilarious descriptions of the numerous idiots, frauds, warmongers, and hypocrites who have been lionized as 19th-century heroes zips along at roughly 50 pages per 10 years. What hobbles so much erudite razzle-dazzle is the breadth of Zamoyski’s challenge: an attempt to unify every act of political rebellion, philosophical upheaval, and cultural convulsion throughout the western world—from Poland to Haiti, from Paoli’s 1755 Corsican rebellion (misinterpreted by Rousseau as a rejection of civilization and a return to a pastoral state of “nature” when it was, in fact, precisely the opposite) to the fall of the Paris Commune. The author shows that, stripped of its mysticism and dreamy idealism, romanticism and patriotism were irrational transfers of what had previously been religious ideas about individual salvation and the divine rights of kings into myths of the noble savage and the savagely noble nation. Typically symbolized by a muscular, bosomy woman in flowing robes, Lady Liberty was no Miss Congeniality. In Poland, Spain, South America, and France, she was no better at defining freedom, defending her borders, nurturing culture, regulating trade, and managing her economic resources than the nasty old kings she replaced. In a tone that slips merrily from the darkly sarcastic to the unimpeachably wise, Zamoyski’s pursuit of unhappiness hops about capriciously, frequently changing locations, time periods, and personalities in a single paragraph. The result strongly debunks past and current notions of 19th-century freedom fighting.
Brash, breezy, and subversively irreverent: Zamoyski makes sausage out of Lafayette, Rousseau, Marx, Bolivar, and other sacred cows—exposing patriotism, romanticism, and the host of other -isms born in their time as dangerous deceptions that are not to die for. (50 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89271-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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