A historical work with some striking images of distinctive Delaware buildings and a dry text.
An illustrated book offers a photographic journey through three centuries of Delaware history.
Between 1638, when Swedish explorers landed on its shores, and the opening of the New Castle & French Town Railroad in 1832, Delaware was something of a Colonial backwater, its few settlements largely clustered along Delaware Bay. As a result, Tabler writes, modern development took some time to reach the Delmarva Peninsula, and “Delaware’s stock of colonial structures has for the most part remained undisturbed far longer than many other colonial era states. Its key historical sites are more readily accessible today.” Those historical sites form the basis for the author’s journey through Delaware’s pre-railroad history, which benefits from his pleasing photographs. Each of the book’s pages consists of images accompanied by captions that are continued in extended footnotes at the back of the volume. There are digressions into such subjects as oyster dredges, Colonial medicine (“ ‘Tooth drawers’ sometimes used such painful practices as string pulling and hot coals to get teeth out”), and Colonial clockmaking. The shots of Delaware’s remarkable red brick buildings stand out, particularly one of a mist-shrouded State Capitol building in Dover. A late afternoon sun illuminates a mill perched on the icy banks of the Choptank River. Tabler also digs up some intriguing historical nuggets—Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours told his father he had situated the family’s gunpowder mill along Brandywine Creek in Wilmington after ruling out other possibilities in Maryland and Virginia because “the country, the people, the location are all worthless.” Brandywine Creek was so named because the Stidham family used its water to make an aquavit liqueur that, in Denmark and Sweden, is known as “Brændevin.” But the book’s structure is awkward, with readers having to jump to and fro between the picture captions and the continuations. And much of the text takes a plain, just-the-facts approach that becomes a bit enervating—“Duncan Beard (1740-1797) was both a clockmaker and silversmith....Beard was a charter member of the Masonic Union Lodge No. 5, chartered in 1765.” Still, the volume should appeal to regional history buffs and proud Delawareans.
A historical work with some striking images of distinctive Delaware buildings and a dry text.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9798987000625
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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