Cliffs Notes for a barstool chat. Anyone with an inkling of the subject, though, will know that there are shelves full of...
A celebrity-driven, dumbed-down, whirlwind tour of Hibernian history.
History is about social movements, about catastrophe and conflict, about accidents, about misperceptions and misunderstandings. It’s about power. McCourt (Singing My Him Song, 2000, etc.), brother of fellow nostalgia-monger Frank McCourt, knows this, but he puts on the blarney at the outset: “To anyone who knows me, it’s no secret that I was never much for the formal schooling when I was a young fellow, paying scant attention when I did happen to attend, remembering little, and leaving it off completely at the ripe old age of thirteen.” Q.E.D. What follows are textbook-glossing sketches on such matters as the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the Flight of the Earls (which McCourt sensibly proposes be rechristened “The Escape of the Earls”), and the recent Troubles, some rendered with only a passing command of the facts. (The word “bride,” for example, does not come from the name of St. Brigid. It’s pleasant to think that without the Irish there would be no such civilizing touches as marriage, but that’s Thomas Cahill’s territory.) These sketches hinge on individual personalities—Hugh O’Neill, Wolfe Tone, the inevitable James Joyce—whom McCourt approaches with reverential awe. The results are not helpful. Of one writer we learn, for instance: “Samuel Beckett was a fascinating man, who gave the world a great body of work.” Of Bernadette Devlin, surely one of the more controversial figures in recent Irish history: “As a young university student, she turned to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for inspiration. In future years some young person, perhaps, will turn to her in the same way.” Over U2 he swoons: “Passionate and thoughtful, the band brought intelligence back to rock-and-roll after what seemed like decades where stupidity in popular music was the norm.” And so on, all in the manner of an enthusiastic village explainer—helpful if you’re a village, otherwise not.
Cliffs Notes for a barstool chat. Anyone with an inkling of the subject, though, will know that there are shelves full of better sources.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7624-1965-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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