A nimbly written, satisfyingly detailed survey, suggesting new directions in considering the Victorian era.
A lively examination of the influence of foreign intellectuals in Victorian England—seen here as both more cosmopolitan and less strait-laced than our popular conceptions generally allow.
Christiansen (Paris Babylon, 1995) notes 19th-century English society was receptive to a very wide variety of cultural influences, whose impact he examines in six long essays. In one, he depicts the painter Théodore Géricault as a fragile youth tormented by dreams of artistic fame and driven to find an audience in London—which, to a large degree, he did (his famous Raft of the “Medusa” caused a sensation when it was exhibited in Piccadilly in 1820). The composer Richard Wagner, also motivated by his stalled career, was less enthralled by repeated visits to the British capital, wondering aloud whether “anything [is] more repugnant than the real genuine Englishman.” Although Christiansen suggests the London music establishment found Wagner “exasperating” (or worse) in return, he notes that “In 1855 Wagner’s music had been freakish, marginal; by 1877 it assumed a central position in . . . Victorian culture.” By contrast, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1847 voyage from America is portrayed as a personal journey meant to assuage his own deep spiritual melancholy. Emerson lectured frequently, however, and he was sufficiently well-received that his journal (English Traits) became a bestseller and his transcendentalist philosophy soon took root in Victorian thought. Later chapters explore how seemingly frivolous trends instigated by particular foreigners—American “spirit rappers” (mediums), Australian cricketers, and Italian purveyors of “exotic dancing” (essentially ballet)—took on a popular resonance that outlasted the Victorian era and entered the mainstream of British cultural life.
A nimbly written, satisfyingly detailed survey, suggesting new directions in considering the Victorian era.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-790-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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