by Bruce C. Daniels ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 1995
Daniels's account is a serious contribution to Puritan scholarship, serving to recharacterize our Puritan fathers in their...
Challenging the enduring legacy of Puritans as dour and joyless disciples of a fastidious religious life, the author remakes the Puritan past, showing them as they so often were: at prayer and at play.
Any resistance our culture displays to excesssexual, emotionalis said to be the result of our early American forebears casting their long, repressive shadow over our lives. But Daniels (History/Univ. of Winnipeg), who has specialized in New England's history, far from overstating his case, examines the Puritans' relationship to "fun'' for the complex, often torturous thing it was. The phrase "sober mirth,'' originating with the Puritans themselves, embodies the ambiguous nature of this relationship. The concept seeks to describe a state of enjoyment that was at once free and controlled, that had the quality of an innocent and sudden burst of laughter cut short before it degenerated into mockery or ridicule. But as was true with all things Puritan, "mirth'' had its sinister side, shot through with the seductions of sin. Given its natural course, mirth might quickly fall into licentiousness, into wanton and wicked abandon. Have fun, the Puritan fathers counseled, but not too much. Perhaps the most interesting part of Daniels's history is his focus on the civic dimensions of recreation. House-raisings and barn-raisings were occasions for communal parties, events that renewed the members' dedication to one another and the common good while offering the chance simply to have a good time. These "productive parties'' changed as the colonial period progressed, duty becoming less a reason and more a pretext for recreation, showing how secular ideas of fun began to evolve in the Puritan community.
Daniels's account is a serious contribution to Puritan scholarship, serving to recharacterize our Puritan fathers in their full human dimensions.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-12500-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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