A delightful hodge-podge of social history.
An inventory of daily life in London circa 1755, when Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language.
Amateur historian Picard (Restoration London, 1998) has compiled an enormous collection of factoids about 18th-century London, an era depicted in William Hogarth’s prints “Gin Lane” and “Beer Street.” The author writes page-long briefs on subjects ranging from hats to poorhouses to the king’s budget. The cumulative effect of these briefs is powerful. In a chapter devoted to amusements, we first read that in London the poor drank 11,326,070 gallons of gin in one year. The next brief describes how the same people baited animals, setting dogs on bulls or pitting roosters against one another for fun and profit. Celebrities other than Johnson and Hogarth appear often. James Boswell, despite his repeated use of prophylactics, contracted gonorrhea several times, for example. His cure cost five guineas. Crucial to Picard’s research into the mundane were parish records, pamphlets, and such Fleet Street publications as The Gentleman’s Magazine. Joseph Massie’s analysis of family incomes also gave her a vivid picture of daily life: with Massie’s statistics she reconstructs the most private of experiences—finances. Whether or not a person begged for supper at a church, purchased it from a baker on the street, or dined at home said much about where that same person would be buried years later—in a mass grave or in a Chippendale casket. Perhaps the most extraordinary subject here is that of the water pipes under London’s streets. The miles of wooden pipes burst constantly, delivered water to houses sometimes only once or twice a week, and served as habitation for eels and fish. Readers may feel inclined to create their own narratives out of Picard’s strands: Imagine a broken water main drenching a sailor walking home from a cockfight where he won a few shillings, money he’ll use to pay for a loaf of bread.
A delightful hodge-podge of social history.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27665-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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 Yorkerstaff 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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