A remarkably absorbing work that requires close attention—and repays in full.
An enthralling book about how finding the truth of a city’s story means finding the truth of your own.
Bell, a British American art critic, has lived in Berlin long enough to feel “the undercurrents and the downward pull that seem inseparable from Berlin’s identity.” In this nuanced, layered narrative, she effectively describes that sensation, creating a complex hybrid of the past and present, framed by the history of the “aggravating and interfering” apartment where she lives—in a neighborhood that has been home to artists and Nazis, entrepreneurs and orphans. “I set myself the task,” she notes, “of writing a portrait of the city….The memory of a place does not lie flat on a straight line of time; it is syncretic and simultaneous, layered in thin sediments of event and passage, inhabitation and mood. Walking around Berlin, she has discovered constant reminders—some deliberate, some not—of the rise of the Reich, the arrival and devastation of the war, and the city’s Cold War division. At the same time, Bell examines the difficulties in her own life. This sense of jumping between themes could have resulted in a tangle of confusion, but the author skillfully weaves the narrative threads into an elegant tapestry. Everything she encounters in the city seems to evoke something else. There are connections between the political and the personal, the beautiful and the obscene, the freedom and the self-repression. Bell wonders if the unification of the two parts of Germany, with East Germany being written out of history by a triumphant West, was an unalloyed positive development for Berlin. She sees a city that has become a maze of aggressive architecture and a culture obsessed with housing costs and property speculation. The author ends with a gesture of ambivalence, with Bell deciding to leave her apartment for somewhere “more manageable and less temperamental.” It’s an odd but strangely fitting coda.
A remarkably absorbing work that requires close attention—and repays in full.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-344-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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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