For a good, single-volume introduction to world history, Read J.M. Roberts’s History of the World (1993). As history,...
The result of an unfinished manuscript discovered 20 years after the author’s death, here are 21 chapters of world history, from ancient China to Shakespeare.
Durant (1885–1981) was near 90 on publication of the 11th volume of his gargantuan history, The Story of Civilization, and he was 92 when he began a series of audiocassette lectures that were to summarize these volumes with emphasis on key figures. Most were completed and many recorded by the time of his death, and here, they make up not so much a one-volume world history as a quirky collection of essays that race through long periods, pausing at intervals for the biography of an important figure. China occupies 12 pages, half devoted to Confucius and the poet Li Po. Nine pages cover Indian history, all but two telling of Buddha and the Ghandis. Clearly more at home in western civilization, the author devotes a generous four chapters to Rome, three to ancient Greece, and the same number to the Renaissance and Reformation. All deliver good capsule histories of these periods along with the lives. Because Durant was educated early last century, his scholarship is centered on Europe and emphasizes great men—an approach that, while politically incorrect, isn’t bad history, just out of fashion. The problem with Durant is that he is not a historian but an educator. One reads good history for pleasure, but Durant for self-improvement. In clear prose, he presents the facts, but the personal opinions he hopes to transmit are those of an educator: a deploring of vice, admiration of virtue, sympathy with the oppressed, a love of art and literature.
For a good, single-volume introduction to world history, Read J.M. Roberts’s History of the World (1993). As history, Durant’s posthumous work is choppy, though it’s a good introduction to the author.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-2612-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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