Lengthy accounts of local politics will strain readers’ attention spans, but the author’s animating affection makes his text...
Loving literary postcard of a picturesque village that appears to grow from the limestone cliffs towering above the Ardèche River in southeastern France.
Merriman (History/Yale Univ.) fashions here an appealing blend of meticulous scholarship and popular narrative. For example, a brief explanation of his initial fascination with the modern village is followed by a description of the nearby cave drawings created 32,000 years ago, the oldest ever discovered. After sketching the terrain, he begins his affectionate chronicle around a.d. 1000, when the first settlers arrived and established “a fortified village.” He then records virtually every moment of significance in Balazuc’s history: storms, floods, crop failures, wars, and wolf attacks. (The author accepts uncritically the story that in 1767, wolves killed 83 people in the area.) Most interesting is Merriman’s lucid account of the emergence of the silk industry after eager 19th-century entrepreneurs planted myriad mulberry trees in and around Balazuc. For a while, the industry transformed the economy: people had jobs, made money, lived reasonably well. But arboreal disease and waning demand eventually took their toll, and the village went through a period of long decline in population and prosperity; only 211 people were living there in 1975. Merriman also records important moments in popular culture—construction of churches and a bridge, the arrival of the first passenger train, telephone, and toilet (the latter not until the mid-20th century)—and follows the fortunes of residents through the Napoleonic era and two world wars. Winemaking is now an important industry there, but the new golden goose is tourism; in the summer, the population of Balazuc balloons to 1,000 and will no doubt inflate even more once this book appears.
Lengthy accounts of local politics will strain readers’ attention spans, but the author’s animating affection makes his text for the most part thoroughly engaging. (15 photographs and 1 map, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05113-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
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