A rich, informative, and engaging collection.
The invention and reinvention of libraries.
Before the printing press, only royals and scholars collected books. A personal library of more than 1,000 volumes was considered huge, “the work of a lifetime.” But by the 16th century, Europe abounded in some 9 million volumes; the book became “no longer an object of wonder, but an everyday aspect of life.” Crawford (New Directions for Academic Liaison Librarians, 2012, etc.), digital humanities research librarian at the University of St. Andrews Library in Scotland, has gathered a dozen illuminating essays by distinguished historians, librarians, and literary scholars about the past, present, and future of the often rarefied space known as the library. Victorianist John Sutherland looks at the growth of public libraries in 19th-century Britain, where the hardback, three-volume novel was unaffordable for ordinary readers. By the 1890s, a new publishing venture followed a hardback first issue with a cheap edition costing a few shillings. This forerunner of the paperback led to the growth of the personal library. Free public libraries, along with fee-based lending libraries, led to a burgeoning readership. At the popular Railway Library, travelers could buy a cheap, pocket-sized book for a journey or even rent one, “borrowed at a departure station and returned at the destination station.” Among essayists on how libraries have been imagined in fiction, poetry, and film, Oxford professor Laura Marcus describes libraries in movies as “repositories of secret or occulted knowledge.” In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, for example, the library is inhabited by angels “who act as the comforters of the living and are able to listen in to their subconscious thoughts.” In Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, “the human mind and memory” hold libraries. Stephen Enniss, director of the esteemed Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, offers a fascinating look at assembling writers’ archives, complicated by the ubiquity of electronic files.
A rich, informative, and engaging collection.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16639-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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