Offers rewarding insights into a period often obscured from view by the decades of conflict that followed.
As Queen Victoria passes, Vienna-based historian Blom (To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting, 2003, etc.) finds a Modern World breaking through the crust.
In this masterful presentation, the time in question is so richly laced with scientific bedazzlement, social ferment and cultural churning that a sense of giddying misadventure begins to feel strangely familiar. The roots of tensions that alternately bind and threaten to fracture today’s Europe are all there, easily visible to us in hindsight but not to most of those who lived through it and experienced as a result, the author posits, mass vertigo. In analytical chronicles of this kind, the little delights that leap out serendipitously are a large part of the reward. The French, supposed masters of the art of love who were unable to reproduce sufficiently to maintain the population, still held sway as cultural arbiters, anointed in 1870 by a historian who noted: “Perhaps nothing is properly understood in Europe until the French have explained it.” Yet these explicating authorities initially greeted groundbreaking painters van Gogh and Gauguin as insane and animalistic. The Viennese specialized in elegant duplicity, with their high airs and public manners masking a seamy nightlife whose amateur prostitutes almost outhustled the pros. Best tidbit: Felix Salten, the Austrian writer who invented precious little Bambi, also produced outrageously pornographic works. Sigmund Freud gave up researching the function of bone marrow in lower fishes just in time to define the malaise of the age—and treat those who could afford him. Parisians shrugged then cowered in fear as growing masses of violent street gangs mocked law and order. Real men hated the proto-feminists, and raving anti-Semites saw Jews behind every ill. From Thomas Eakins’s stroboscopic photos to Duchamp’s descending nude, everything was coming apart.
Offers rewarding insights into a period often obscured from view by the decades of conflict that followed.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-01116-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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