Bravely drawn popular history: thoroughly researched, muscular with details and rendered in enchanting prose.
Seasoned historian Dallas (1945: The War That Never Ended, 2005, etc.) serves up exquisite slices of Parisian lore.
Twelve Métro stops in the city of lights come blazing to life in this unusual tome. “There are many histories of Paris,” the author writes, “but they won’t fit in a pocket or a traveling sack.” Instead he gives us “little vignettes drawn from Paris’s rich two-thousand year history.” Such a wide-ranging project might fail in lesser writers’ hands, but London-born Dallas, a longtime resident of France, infectiously conveys his love and deep knowledge. From Métro stop No. 1, Denfert-Rochereau, the visitor to Paris can stroll in an area “once called Hell,” considered in the 1800s “the most frightening, deserted part of Paris” (Dallas explains why). From there, he moves on to the Gare du Nord, Métro stop No. 2, and the “charitable mysticism of Saint Vincent de Paul,” who in the 17th century established a group of homes for foundlings that was soon transformed by politicians into “a veritable industry of abandoned children.” Métro stop No. 3, the Trocadéro, was the stomping grounds of Dr. Otto Rank, “one of the great heretics of the psychoanalytic movement,” a disciple and later a critic of Freud, and the lover of Anaïs Nin. Métro stop No. 7, Châtelet-Les Halles, is a place frozen in the late 19th century for any reader of Émile Zola’s novel Le Ventre de Paris. Claude Debussy’s scandalous life and his friendship with Marcel Proust are interwoven with a riveting history of the Paris Opéra (Métro stop No. 9). The final stop is Père Lachaise, the largest of the city’s cemeteries, where Dallas intertwines the last years of Oscar Wilde and the imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the subject of France’s most notorious miscarriage of justice. A recommended reading list rounds out this gripping guide for the intellectual tourist.
Bravely drawn popular history: thoroughly researched, muscular with details and rendered in enchanting prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1695-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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