Bother in the Cathedral—enervating bother—as veteran juvenile author L'Engle frogmarches her 70-ish protagonist through a talkathon of troubles and a marathon of acquaintanceships with bishops, deans, nuns, and others at an Episcopal church in upper Manhattan. Katherine Vigneras, retired from a stellar concert-pianist career to what she expects to be townhouse solitude in lower Manhattan, is contacted by an old, transformed acquaintance: the once-dissolute young man who married (and divorced) Katherine's first love-rival is now . . . elderly Bishop Felix Bodeway. So, gradually, Katherine slips into the Church society: the companionable and talented family of Dean Davidson, including budding musical genius Emily (who lost her leg in what might not have been an accident); brilliant organist Llew Owen, grieving over his wife's childbirth-death; Bishop Allie Undercroft, who reminds Katherine so much of the German WW II commandant in her past; Allie's wife Yolande, former pop-star from a seedy Colombian background; Sister Isobel, once married to Allie; Yolande's sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Gomez; and Sister Catherine, a nun of extraordinary spiritual strengths. Plus, at home, there are Katherine's two tenants: orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mimi Oppenheimer, who proffers comforts and says "Oy veh"; and pregnant Dorcas, separated from a hateful husband who cheated on her with a man. And furthermore, while all of these folks pour out confidences and confessions, Katherine's own tangled past slowly bubbles forth: pianist/composer husband Justin, you see, had his hands broken and was castrated in Auschwitz; yet he urged Katherine to go forth and multiply; so children Julie and Michou (killed tragically at seven) were conceived with help from a Cardinal, a Norwegian conductor, and that Nazi commandant. The action, then, is minimal—as Katherine moves from Cathedral practice for a benefit concert to lessons-for-Emily to social gatherings, ever shuttling between the Village and St. John's. But eventually, after listening and giving advice ad infinitum, Katherine does solve the matters of Emily's secret terrer and seine obscene phone calls. With bland characters, all speaking in the same liturgical-paced cadences: an immense but serenely soaring mess—no livelier or crisper than L'Engle's last foray into adult fiction, The Other Side of the Sun.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0374517835
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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