A gargantuan panorama of the 15 transforming years immediately after the Napoleonic era, when "peace came and immense new resources in finance, management, science and technology which were now available could be put to constructive purposes." Johnson (Intellectuals, 1989; A History of the Jews, 1987, etc.), a past editor of the New Statesman and the Spectator, is a master of vigorous narratives on epic topics. Astoundingly, he writes with fascination about events and movements in virtually all fields of human endeavor, whether the subjugation of Native Americans by Andrew Jackson, the scientific discoveries of Humphrey Davy, the compositions of Beethoven, the transparent innovations of George Stephenson and John McAdam, or such social phenomena as dueling, adultery, illegitimacy, and animal protectionism. He also throws an unexpected light on how artists and scientists formed a "conjunction of minds" by drawing on work in other fields (e.g., how intuitive speculations by Coleridge and Shelley about atomic and electromagnetic theory inspired the experimental science of Davy and Michael Faraday). Johnson's narrative and analytical skills even compensate for many dubious passages when his conservatism leads him to stretch for parallels between 19th- and 20th-century politics—for example, when he sees the genesis of the US-British "special relationship" at a moment when both nations continued to be wary of the other's attention, or likens Romantic admirers of Napoleon such as Shelley, Hazlitt, and Byron to intellectuals enamored of Stalinism in the 1930's. Maddeningly long and highly opinionated, but a lively and readable history of a world "exhilarated and sometimes bewildered by the rapid changes which were transforming it.
Pub Date: June 5, 1991
ISBN: 0060922826
Page Count: 1120
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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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