A grisly, grim slog through the history of Victorian murder, punctuated occasionally by intriguing historical lessons.
Flanders (Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, 2006, etc.) attempts to trace the growth of murder and its detection in Victorian England.
The author does not track the history of crime-solving during this period; most crimes were solved by the simple expedient of someone pointing a finger. The accused had very few rights, and those who couldn’t afford to pay a lawyer were on their own. Flanders devotes most of her book to murders—one after another after another, many sensational, others notable for the innocence of the executed. Since the author does not present the murders chronologically, it’s difficult to tell if the murder trials had any effect on the evolution of the rights of defendants. Instead, Flanders organizes the text according to who killed whom: husband/wife, servants/employers, etc. The author demonstrates the significance of the press in the investigations of the murders. From the beginning of the 19th century, broadsides and “penny dreadfuls” were circulated immediately after an event. Those and the newspapers of the time readily admitted that truth was irrelevant—profit was the goal. Their treatment of the accused depended largely on their social class. Theaters and authors profiled victims and events from the news of the day. Charles Dickens was the most prolific of these, using incidents and even quotes in many books, including Bleak House and Oliver Twist. Though Flanders ably follows the important role played by the media, readers seeking information about the establishment of the first police force or detective department, or laws passed to protect defendants, should look elsewhere.
A grisly, grim slog through the history of Victorian murder, punctuated occasionally by intriguing historical lessons.Pub Date: July 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02487-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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