Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism.
A keen, dense examination of crimes of passion in the decades before World War I.
Novelist Appignanesi (Sacred Ends, 2013, etc.), who chairs the Freud Museum, explores three narratives of violence, arguing that the subsequent scandalous trials reveal changing perspectives on women in terms of psychology, spirituality, and class. She notes how the era’s perceptions of feminine virtue made transformative legal dramas inevitable: “If a woman was being tried for murder and there was no insanity plea,” she writes, “then she could only be either innocent or a monster of depravity.” The first obscure tales from Victorian-era England and Paris foreshadow the modern phenomena of tampering and stalking. In Brighton, Christiana Edmunds was charged with a boy’s murder following a public panic over poisoned chocolates, which she’d distributed in a plot to win back a married lover, and was ultimately committed rather than executed: “This moral insanity was understood as a disease…and it predisposed the patient to commit criminal acts.” A few years later, singer Marie Bière shot her caddish ex-boyfriend in public following the death of the daughter he’d rejected. Although he survived to testify against her, her attorneys’ narrative of hysteria provoked by cruelty resulted in acquittal. Appignanesi views this in terms of French Republican virtue: “It now seem[ed] more permissible for women to act, and to act violently if need be, to protect or avenge their honor.” The author focuses on the seamier aspects of the better-recalled Stanford White–Evelyn Nesbit scandal, emblematic of Gilded Age New York, noting that the teenage Nesbit had married White's eventual murderer, brutish millionaire Harry Thaw, after he'd raped and assaulted her: “Evelyn continued to be pulled apart by the two men, each fearing that the other might trump him in her favours and in revelations about illicit acts.” Appignanesi patiently constructs a mosaic of law, psychology, and class strictures, producing more of a sweeping academic meditation than a true-crime narrative.
Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-814-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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