No dull required course here—a vivid tale populated with flesh-and-blood characters, from the two Henrys to the cadavers...
Science writer Hayes (Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood, 2005, etc.) combines a you-are-there account with interesting biographical details about the men who put the human body on the map.
The map is Gray’s Anatomy, the reference work, originally titled Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, used by generations of medical students since its first edition was published in 1858. Curious to know more about the brilliant teacher who had the revolutionary idea of writing an anatomy text to assist surgeons, the author learned that there wasn’t much to tell: Henry Gray died young and horribly of smallpox. The meticulous illustrator of Gray’s text, however, had a long, extraordinary life, and Hayes found a trove of diaries and letters to flesh it out. Henry Vandyke Carter, a few years younger than Gray, was a diffident figure, confident in his drawing skills but given to dark moods, self-blame and anxieties about religious faith. Nevertheless, the two Henrys worked well together and produced to glowing acclaim a revolutionary volume. Gray did well financially, but many of Carter’s duties were unpaid. He finally moved to Bombay, where he conducted research, taught anatomy and practiced medicine. His exemplary career was blighted by a scandalous love affair with a woman who bore him a child. Hayes unfolds a Hollywood-like plot, complete with a (sort-of) happy ending. Interspersed with this story, the author relates his personal experiences in gross-anatomy classes, conveying a sense of wonder at the beauty and complexity of the human body and the evolutionary compromises that have shaped it.
No dull required course here—a vivid tale populated with flesh-and-blood characters, from the two Henrys to the cadavers themselves.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-45689-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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