Emmerson largely confines himself to history and national concerns with only a passing look at international politics on the...
Most books about the year 1913 deal with the run-up to World War I. Emmerson (The Future History of the Arctic, 2010), fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, casts his net more widely, depicting life in two dozen great cities on the eve of the event that either ushered in the modern world or didn’t (historians still debate this).
The author has little new to say but says it well, and the further he travels from Europe, the more he illuminates areas unfamiliar to even educated readers. Parallels between eras a century apart are not in short supply. Observers in 1913 were already extolling a globalized planet, knit together by dazzling advances in technology. Democracy and capitalism seemed the wave of the future despite the disturbing spread of terrorist movements. The reigning superpower, Britain, was in relative decline, with Asia re-awakening and other rising powers flexing their muscles. In five chapters, Emmerson examines European capitals on a continent that took for granted that it was the center of the world, barely aware that the United States (four particular cities) was poised to take over that role. The hinterlands (Buenos Aires, Tehran, Jerusalem and others), colonies (Winnipeg, Bombay, Algiers and others) and Asian metropolises complete Emmerson’s world tour. Although ostensibly about cities, the author also describes the country involved, often emphasizing a major figure—e.g., Woodrow Wilson in Washington, Gandhi in Durban, South Africa.
Emmerson largely confines himself to history and national concerns with only a passing look at international politics on the verge of the Great War, but this is an intelligent picture of our world exactly 100 years ago.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-256-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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