A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.
The ageless genre of city histories receives a fine addition.
Though London was the biggest city in the world in the 19th century, it does not even make the top 10 today. Jenkins, a lifelong Londoner who served as the editor of Evening Standard and the Times and is now a columnist at the Guardian, clearly loves his home city, and he leavens his enthusiasm with expertise and a highly critical eye. Beginning as Londinium, founded after the 43 C.E. Roman invasion, by the end of the century, it was a cosmopolitan city of 60,000. It nearly disappeared after Rome withdrew in 410 but pulled itself together after two centuries and prospered as a trading center, surviving the black plague and a civil war to become a European power by 1500. Henry VIII’s looting of the church produced vast wealth, and Elizabeth’s disinterest in aggressive wars did nothing to discourage London’s rise to “Europe’s premier financial centre.” Until he reaches the middle of the 17th century, Jenkins delivers traditional history, mixing politics, culture, and trade. City planning and architecture take a back seat because little that was built still exists. Thereafter, the author takes his love of the city literally by concentrating on city government, delving heavily into the backgrounds of neighborhoods, palaces, squares, monuments, roads, and infrastructure. Londoners and frequent visitors will relish his expert, opinionated, and sometimes highly unflattering picture. While many European cities that rebuilt after World War II carefully preserved their historical gems, Britain did no such thing, giving builders carte blanche. As a result, “they inflicted greater destruction on London…than all Hitler’s bombs.” Readers unfamiliar with the city’s geography will appreciate the generous maps and illustrations but may feel the urge to skim many detailed accounts of local property development.
A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-552-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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