The author’s extensive knowledge of lifestyles and simple, concise writing combine for an enjoyable book showing how...
Social historian Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London, 2014, etc.) follows the evolution of the home from an edifice offering minimal shelter to present-day standards.
First, the author classifies European cultures into "house" countries and "home" countries. The former includes those populations that spend their time in public spaces such as restaurants, promenading. The latter is more an experience of comfort, the imagined state of the good life. With that division, Flanders chronicles the life-altering changes to the structure of houses over the centuries. One of the first was the arrival of the fireplace and chimney and their placement away from the center of the room, enabling larger, two-story houses. Soon, the availability of glass allowed larger windows, which led to curtains. Suddenly, there was a need for privacy, so extra rooms were added, while the lovely large windows were covered to keep out light. The author compares the house countries in which houses were a status symbol to the Northwest European home countries, where the concentration was on convenience and enjoyment. Flanders does not neglect the inhabitants of these buildings, and her telling of a family making a stew perfectly illustrates the pre-industrial roles shared equally by men and women. The Industrial Revolution changed the makeup of the home. Workers now left the home to make a living in factories and offices. New technologies developed such things as piped water, plumbing, heat, electricity, and, eventually, 20th-century “labor saving” devices, which quickly created the divisions into gender-based roles. Covering all aspects of home life, Flanders even delves into modern architecture, popular in the house countries, which creates designs for ostentation rather than usefulness.
The author’s extensive knowledge of lifestyles and simple, concise writing combine for an enjoyable book showing how families have joined, separated, and rejoined over the last 500 years.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06735-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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