The author’s vast stores of scholarship and reading keep this jaunty trek from becoming corny.
In a companion volume to Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (2006), prolific English historian Johnson offers a highly idiosyncratic selection of his favorite extraordinary mortals, male and female.
The conservative world view evident in works like Intellectuals (1989) was slightly muffled in Creators, but it's back with all flags flying here, especially in a bizarrely reactionary final chapter on the “heroic trinity” of Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II. (Not that the incongruous essay that precedes it, “Heroism Behind the Greasepaint: Mae West and Marilyn Monroe,” is much more enlightened.) Safely dead for millennia, Alexander the Great and Caesar are less surprising choices, though their ruthless quest of vast empires and boundless self-ambition gives Johnson some pause. Churchill, naturally, wins a solid place as a “generous hero,” while de Gaulle is grudgingly included as “a heroic monster.” The Hebrews “made full use of the brains and courage of their women,” declares Johnson in a chapter on the biblical feats of Deborah, Judith, Samson and David. Though the author believes that “when performed by women [heroism’s] element of hate and inhumanity appears particularly savage, he nonetheless lists British Queen Boudica, who led a surprisingly successful revolt against Roman rule in 60–61 A.D. Medieval nationalist figures Joan of Arc and Henry V are cited, along with the predicable pantheon of Elizabethan heroes honed “in the age of the axe.” Superhumans fashioned “in the roar of the cannon’s mouth” (Washington, Nelson and Wellington) are followed by Civil War leaders Lincoln and Lee. Johnson offers some terrific choices in Jane Welsh Carlyle, stuck in a torturous marriage, and reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, whose life was a “successful struggle against fear.” Wittgenstein warrants a long, tedious chapter, though the author perks up while discussing famous hostesses throughout history.
The author’s vast stores of scholarship and reading keep this jaunty trek from becoming corny.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-114316-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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