Little more than a smoothly written rehash of the current academic consensus on the Edwardians, but perfectly satisfactory...
Serviceable account of England’s tumultuous years between Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 and the outbreak of WWI.
“The persistent myth depicts the Edwardian era as a long and leisurely afternoon,” writes Hattersley (The Life of John Wesley, 2003, etc.); in fact it was “the time when a modern nation was born.” The “myth” he aims to dispel is largely confined to coffee-table books and pop biographies: it’s not news to historians or even well-informed general readers that the idle ways of Edward VII and the Marlborough House Set were less representative of Edwardian Britain than the radical challenges to the established order posed by the nascent Labour Party, the suffragettes, Bloomsbury’s novelists and artists or the playwrights of ideas led by George Bernard Shaw. But those not familiar with The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) and other scholarly classics on which Hattersley freely draws may be startled by his portrait of a society finally liberated from 64 years of tranquil but stifling Victorian prosperity into the alluring, uncertain 20th century. Perhaps because the author was for many years a Labour MP, the book contains some tediously detailed chapters about parliamentary wrangling over free trade, colonial wars, organized labor, Ireland, public education and social welfare legislation—big subjects still fiercely debated today that deserve more engaging treatment than they receive here. Hattersley does better on Edwardian culture, painting with broad but vivid strokes the flowering of naturalistic, socially conscious fiction, post-Impressionist painting, Ibsenite drama and the increasingly professionalized sports (most notably football and cricket) that resulted from a working class with leisure time and spare cash. He does not neglect such communications and transportation innovations as tabloid newspapers, polar exploration and automobiles; scientific and religious developments get big-picture treatment as well. What his text lacks in a strong point of view, it mostly makes up for in entertaining anecdotes and readable prose.
Little more than a smoothly written rehash of the current academic consensus on the Edwardians, but perfectly satisfactory on those terms.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34012-5
Page Count: 506
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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 Yorkerstaff 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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