An entertaining mélange of scholarship and scandal.
Picture books on English country houses are an ongoing genre, but this is a genuine work of history.
Mixing research and gossip, historian Tinniswood has written three volumes on his favorite subject. Although this first volume summarizes its long history, the author concentrates on the golden age of the country house between 1870 and 1914, when hundreds were built or drastically remodeled and a great deal of new money was invested in what was widely if not universally believed to be “a supremely attractive, if mythic, vision of the past.” British media and magazines such as Country Life glamorized the country, persuading successful businessmen from around the world to live in titanic mansions surrounded by vast estates. Tinniswood knows his subject, but readers may be surprised to discover that there are no illustrations. A coffee-table book such as The Country House by David Cannadine might help readers as an additional reference when Tinniswood delves into architectural, interior decorating, and landscaping details. There are the expected topics—gardens, hunting, servants, royal visits, foreign villas, the arrival of the automobile, and modern conveniences. Readers with a taste for action will welcome accounts of country house fires, country house crimes, and owners’ often spectacular sexual peccadilloes and divorces. Imported, mostly American plutocrats make their mark, and readers will receive an education in upper-class antisemitism, traditional but not universal and less vicious than the Continental version.
An entertaining mélange of scholarship and scandal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781541602793
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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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