to be resolved. (30 b&w maps and photos)
Readable, introductory survey of the popular Irish personalities whose ideals, rhetoric, and stubborn courage culminated in
the 1999 Peace Accords. Although he's an American, Golway (Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America's Fight for Irish Freedom, 1998) lets enough indignation, anguish, and sly humor slip into his cavalcade of Irish heroes to reveal pretty clearly where his sympathies lie. Of course, it's difficult for any fair-minded person not to be sympathetic (if not depressed) when faced with a history of the Irish people—whose ordinary human urges to be safe, secure, and well-fed (or merely left alone) have been thwarted by so many centuries of religious strife, British exploitation, regional enslavement, bad government, treachery, famine, and a climate more suited to frogs than people. Golway finds nobility in so much strife as he celebrates the heroic achievements of Irish men and women of all classes, religions, and political sympathies, whose only common trait was a belief that their nation deserved better than the status quo. Beginning with Brian Boru, who gathered the island's squabbling clans and routed the Vikings in 1014, Golway jumps to Hugh O'Neill, the 16th-century Irish earl who rebelled against Elizabeth I's persecution of Catholics. Famous writers such as Jonathan Swift and W.B. Yeats take their bows as nationalist and anti-British brotherhoods spring up in the countryside, led by the likes of Michael Collins and Gerry Adams. Though Golway isn't afraid to point out occasions in which the Irish were their own worst enemy, he blames almost all of Ireland's problems on the British. He concludes that its statehood would not have occurred without the financial and political support of Irish-Americans. History is far more than the deeds of heroes, but by defining Ireland's past in terms of its salient personalities, Golway reveals how the violent, factionalized Irish would rather see themselves: as willing participants in a heroic struggle that has yet
to be resolved. (30 b&w maps and photos)Pub Date: March 3, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85556-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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