Chilling historical evidence of the dire consequences of inequality and injustice.
While artists and writers rebelled against aesthetic conventions, anarchists terrorized pre–World War I Paris.
The author of several histories of Parisian unrest, Merriman (History/Yale Univ.; Massacre: The Life and the Death of the Paris Commune, 2014, etc.) uncovers the dark side of the famed belle epoque, offering a fresh perspective on the reality of life for much of the city’s population. While Proust, Picasso, and Apollinaire pursued their art, laborers and craftspeople barely subsisted on low wages, facing destitution if they became ill or were laid off. Angry revolutionaries railed against worker exploitation, political corruption, and injustice; some, calling themselves “illegalists,” believed that “any acts against society were justified,” including theft. Central to Merriman’s revelatory history are two self-proclaimed anarchists: Belgian-born Victor Kibaltchiche (he later changed his surname to Serge), the son of Russian émigrés, and his companion, French-born Rirette Maîtrejean. Merriman draws heavily on their memoirs, supplemented by archival sources and other contemporary testimony. Unfortunately, many quoted passages are not introduced by speaker, forcing readers to turn to the endnotes to make sense of the citations. Victor and Rirette did not condone violence. However, like their fellow anarchists, they believed “that once states had been destroyed, people could live in harmony in natural groupings. They believed fervently that people were basically good” but that government, capitalism, organized religion, and professional armies fomented conflict. Merriman focuses on a particular wave of robberies committed by the Bonnot Gang, led by Jules Bonnot, a sometime mechanic who could not bear anyone in authority. With a string of arrests behind him, in 1911, he and his armed accomplices—“not a finely organized group, but rather a band in flux”—launched into robberies and, later, murder. The author details the aggressive police response and the alarming newspaper articles that incited public panic. Inevitably, Victor and Rirette were swept up as suspects, “accused of being intellectuals who encouraged illegalist criminality,” although they had no connection to Bonnot.
Chilling historical evidence of the dire consequences of inequality and injustice.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56858-988-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | WORLD
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 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
