A painless reminder that historical figures often become clichés. Now known as the epitome of Puritan intolerance, Mather...
A lively history of the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic, the first in America to feature inoculation.
During that time period, “inoculation” transferred the actual virus from a victim to the patient, producing mild, but occasionally serious, smallpox. Historian Williams (Hurricane of Independence: The Untold Story of the Deadly Storm at the Deciding Moment of the American Revolution, 2008) narrates through the lens of eminent Puritan minister Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. Readers who think they know who championed this lifesaving advance are in for a jolt. The author delivers a history of Puritanism, emphasizing that most believers had no objection to the scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment period. Mather was an enthusiastic naturalist. Elected to the British Royal Society, he corresponded with other members in London and throughout Europe. As the epidemic spread, he urged inoculation, but only one Boston physician, Zabdiel Boylston, took him up on it. Others denounced it. The dispute mushroomed, producing a flood of pamphlets, abusive newspaper essays, decrees forbidding inoculation (which Boylston ignored) and even an attempt on Mather’s life. Many attacks appeared in the New-England Courant published by James Franklin, whose younger brother, Benjamin, played a minor role. Some readers may skim extensive quotes from sermons, editorials and speeches teeming with personal attacks, rumors, anecdotes and appeals to religion. Ultimately, Mather’s opponents ignored evidence that Boylston’s inoculation worked, preferring to proclaim that it was useless, dangerous or a violation of God’s will.
A painless reminder that historical figures often become clichés. Now known as the epitome of Puritan intolerance, Mather had a genuine interest in science, unlike most doctors in 1721 Boston.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4022-3605-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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 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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