Highlights of Victorian low-life, from costermongers’ barrows, East End brothels, and “penny gaffs” to Scotland Yard, the court system, and the prison hulks. Any reader looking for the real-life context for Bill Sikes, Prof. Moriarty, and Raffles the Gentleman Thief will find a vivid, occasionally lurid one in this true-crime history by novelist-biographer Donald Thomas (The Ripper’s Apprentice, 1989; Henry Fielding, 1991; etc.). Concentrating on London, this history leans heavily on such notable sources as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor, the priapic memoirs (by a diarist known only as “Walter”) entitled My Secret Life, and Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. Through these and other sources, Thomas covers the environs of working-class criminals (sometimes known as “the poor who fought back”), from the slums of Whitechapel and the tenements of “The Devil’s Acre” in Westminster, colloquially called “rookeries” and “rabbit-warrens.” These firsthand accounts of thieves and prostitutes, dodgers and doxies, come alive through Mayhew’s investigations and Walter’s confessions. Thomas, on his own merits, proves best on more intricate crimes: the Great Bullion Robbery, in which several hundredweight of gold was stolen from railway safes designed by the redoubtable locksmith John Chubb; the career of the forger “Jem the Penman,” actually the successful barrister James Saward; and a notorious case in which an arch con man corrupted three detectives to cover his tracks. After this comprehensive chronicle of crime, Thomas concludes with the punishments, newly designed prisons, and miscarriages of justice. Strangely absent is the most notorious Victorian criminal, Jack the Ripper, whose killings were unlike any in England before and struck at the era’s heart. Otherwise, the only thing missing is Thomas’s own insights into Victorian morality and criminality, for which the richness of the material cries out. A colorful survey of what one reformer called “Darkest England,” though Thomas is content to watch from the shadows. (60 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-8147-8238-8
Page Count: 346
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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