William H. McNeill's The Rise of the West is perhaps the most lucid and intelligent one-volume presentation of world history in narrative form ever written. Winner of the National Book Award in History and Biography in 1964, it is surely one of the most scholarly and exciting histories of our times. The reader expecting something dramatically new in McNeill's A World History will be disappointed. It is little more than a condensation of the larger history, written in slightly simpler language. In The Rise of the West the author divided history into three eras: Middle Eastern dominance to 500 B.C., Eurasian cultural balance to 1500 A.D., and the era of Western dominance to the present. His central thesis was that the civilizations of mankind had important interrelations at every stage of their history. He says exactly the same thing in the new book: "Such a survey as this ought to bring home the uncertainty and open-endedness of cultural interactions between Western and non-Western mankind. (In mankind's future) there will surely be blending and intermingling of cultures, as there has always been in the past when men of divergent styles of life met and mingled." Although it is completely re-written, A World History is chapter for chapter a simplified parallel to The Rise of the West. Not having the benefit of pertinent front matter, this reader can only assume that the new version is intended as a student text or as a "reading" edition for those incapable of dealing with the original. One wonders why anyone needs A World History when the complete text of The Rise of the West is available in paper for only a dollar and a half.
Pub Date: April 27, 1967
ISBN: 019511616X
Page Count: 668
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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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