Impressive scholarship applied to a fascinating episode.
A riveting account of a horrific murder in 19th-century Ireland that is also a scholarly analysis of culture, politics, religion, and mythology.
Bridget Cleary, a young housewife in rural Tipperary, was burned to death by her husband Michael in the presence of relatives and neighbors on a spring day in 1895. Bourke (Irish/University College, Dublin) sorts through conflicting court records and journalists’ accounts to discern exactly what happened. To explain why it happened, she explores the rich, imaginative oral tradition still alive in Victorian Ireland. English was replacing Irish, and literacy, uniformity, and central authority were gaining sway. But many people, particularly Ireland’s numerous illiterates, continued to believe in fairies—powerful entities who could spirit away a wife and leave a deceitful changeling in her place. This creature, folklore maintained, could be banished by burning, and the true wife’s return could be secured through certain rituals. In such a world, Michael Cleary’s act becomes understandable—but, on the other hand, the crime can be also seen as a frustrated, angry husband’s act of domestic violence against a too-independent, possibly too-flirtatious wife. Bourke places the story of Bridget’s burning in historical context, showing how the event was seized by those in England opposed to Irish Home Rule as evidence that the Irish were too savage to govern themselves. Further background to the times is provided by her account of another scandalous affair involving an Irishman that same year: Oscar Wilde’s libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury and his own subsequent trial, conviction, and imprisonment. Bourke’s knowledge of English and Irish political history, her sympathetic understanding of Irish folklore, her meticulous descriptions of the life and ways of the landless poor, the authority of the Catholic church, the court’s procedures, and the workings of the prison system all make for an extraordinary look at the Ireland of a century ago.
Impressive scholarship applied to a fascinating episode.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89270-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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