A "Devil's Dictionary" of the Emerald Isle, in which Oxford don Eagleton (Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, not reviewed) cheerfully detonates myths left and right about Eire's history, culture, and current condition.
Tourists who come to Ireland expecting to find a nation of Barry Fitzgerald look-alikes quaffing Guinness and clutching rosary beads are in for a shock, Eagleton warns. Nowadays - thanks to a highly educated population, strong European Union ties, and a surging economy that has caused the nation to be labeled the Celtic Tiger - you're more likely to find "computers, Big Macs, Japanese cuisine, bad American movies on TV,… a thriving film industry known as Paddywood, and more lawyers than leprechauns." In an attempt to banish the misconceptions, Eagleton offers an alphabetically arranged mulligan stew of Irish slang, key phrases, historical figures, and place names. Subjects range from the famous and expected (Yeats, emigration, Saint Patrick) to the less familiar, even obscure (among the 20 things that make Ireland unique: more dogs per capita than any other European Union nation). Sometimes the drollery is genial (e.g., God is defined as "an astonishingly popular figure in Ireland, second only to Bono, lead singer of the rock group U2"). Other times Eagleton can be biting, particularly on two favorite fixations of the intelligentsia: the Catholic Church and the legacy of British imperial rule ("English attitudes to the Irish are a bizarre mixture of affection, uneasiness, condescension and hostility").
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25488-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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