A thematically linked series of insightful essays that will delight students of cultural Americana and fans of the history...
From innovative, Bancroft Prize–winning historian Lepore (The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, 1998), a group portrait of seven 19th-century Americans whose efforts in the development of language paralleled and contributed to the growth of our national identity.
Lepore (History/Boston Univ.) relates here the stories of Noah Webster, who sought to standardize American spelling; William Thornton, designer of an international alphabet; Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah, inventor of a written language meant to help his tribesmen avoid assimilation; Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who brought the French idea of sign language for the deaf to the New World; the Mississippi cotton plantation slave Abd al-Rahman, who used his knowledge of Arabic to prove his royal heritage and win his freedom and repatriation to Africa; the frustrated artist Samuel Morse, creator of a telegraph language he believed might promote peace and human understanding; and Alexander Graham Bell, whose efforts to teach the deaf to speak led to his development of the telephone. The seven mini-biographies weave in and around and give new shading to many recognizable aspects of US history: the development of the Constitution and emerging ideas of nationhood, the “back to Africa” movement of the 1820s, the laying of the Atlantic cable in 1858, the advent of an era of American technological enthusiasm in the 1870s. The author’s thesis—that her protagonists’ strong ideas about language and communication are integral to the nation-building that occupied 19th-century America—seems indisputable, although she herself concedes that grouping these particular stories together is something of a contrivance. Indeed, at times Lepore seems to struggle with sustaining a coherent booklength narrative, but she nonetheless elucidates important back-currents of America’s cultural history with splendid erudition.
A thematically linked series of insightful essays that will delight students of cultural Americana and fans of the history of language.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40449-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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