A spirited look at the Parisian move into “Système D”—crisis mode.
A capable layman’s history of the Paris flood of 1910.
The flood precipitated an outpouring of relief and general cooperation by the inhabitants, and the fairly predictable and successful outcome—the city quickly got back on its feet in a few months—robs the elegant narrative of any shattering denouement. The city’s reaction to the flood, however, functioned as a “dress rehearsal” for World War I, and Jackson wisely keeps this in mind as he threads the elements of gravitas throughout his tale. The rising water levels of the three major rivers around Paris—the Marne, Yonne and Seine—began to converge on Paris by mid-January, due perhaps to unusual warming, elevated levels of rainfall and deforestation. The outlying suburbs were submerged by Jan. 24. People began to measure the terrifying progress of the Seine by its height on the statues of the bridges. Due largely to the dictates of the tireless, dedicated prefecture of police, Louis Lépine, the military activated relief efforts, rescuing people on requisitioned boats, piling sandbags along the quays, constructing passerelles (“a complicated system of wooden walkways and footbridges”), housing victims in schools and churches and remaining vigilant for looting. Charitable organizations took charge, especially the Red Cross, and U.S. President Taft, head of the American Red Cross, offered aid. Jackson adds an effective human-interest touch by extracting entries from diaries and letters by eyewitnesses, such as American writer Helen Davenport Gibbons and French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Thanks to the Parisian solidarity across class lines, the city did not have to resort to martial law, and disease remained at bay. The author includes the post-flood debate about nature vs. science, and finds useful comparison in recent crises such as Hurricane Katrina.
A spirited look at the Parisian move into “Système D”—crisis mode.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61706-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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