Although this biography was respectfully reviewed when it was first published in England — due, one suspects, as much to its author as to its subject — it was apparent that, for his countrymen, Ronald Knox, the man, remains essentially remote. It is not likely then that the personality of this priest-scholar-artist will be any more meaningful to American readers, whether or not they have the advantage, in this case, of being Catholic. This is a failure due, it would seem, not to his biographer who has spared little detail in attempting to capture his elusive subject, but to the particular nature of Ronald Knox: he was, Mr. Waugh admits, "essentially a private person". Ronald Knox was born in 1888, the youngest of a family of four sons and two daughters. His ancestry and upbringing (his father was later to be Bishop of Manchester) made the Church seem a natural profession. He excelled at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford where he was one of the most promising members of the College. In 1915 he became a priest of the Church of England and later, during the war, in 1917, he became a Catholic. He spent some unhappy years at an inferior Catholic school where his talents, it was felt, were not put to proper use. But later he took over the Catholic chaplaincy at Oxford and spent 13 years there. In 1939 he revised the Westminster Hymnal and Manual of Prayer, in 1942 he completed his translation of the New Testament and in 1948 he finished the Old Testament. He died in 1957 at 69. Mr. Waugh states that "the primary purpose of this book is to tell the story of Ronald Knox's exterior life, not to give a conspectus of his thought; still less to measure his spiritual achievements". He does more than record his subject's exterior life; he provides a record of a lost era — which World War I changed forever.
Pub Date: June 15, 1959
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1959
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
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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