Hobsbawm speaks to the crucial need for engaged public intellectuals and the kind of rigorous social and political analysis...
The last writings of an eminent British historian.
Hobsbawm (How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, 2011, etc.), who died in 2012, gathers 22 essays that represent his deep and wide historical interests: 19th-century European culture, the role of the public intellectual, and the relationship of art to science, revolution and power. Selections include book reviews, journal articles and lectures, half previously unpublished. Hobsbawm characterizes the present as intellectually shattered: “an era of history that has lost its bearing, and which in the early years of the new millennium looks forward…guideless and mapless, to an unrecognizable future.” Science, religion and the arts, he contends, have lost their cultural force, and the current distrust of science marks a vast change from the 19th-century belief that it “held up the temple of progress.” The author champions such influential thinkers as chemist J.D. Bernal, author of The Social Function of Science (1939), and biochemist Joseph Needham, author of a groundbreaking history of Chinese science; both men aimed to affect “changing relations…between science and society.” Hobsbawm sees a “major cause for alarm” in the “rise of radical but predominantly right-wing ideologies” within Protestant Christianity and Islam. Fundamentalist movements are concerned not with fostering community but with “powerful, individual spiritual experiences.” The arts, he writes, no longer “function as measures of good and bad, as carriers of value: of truth, beauty and catharsis,” but instead have become merely consumer items for personal satisfaction. “Who can tell,” he asks, “on what terms reason and revived anti-reason will coexist in the ongoing earthquakes and tsunamis of the twenty-first century?” Global movements toward widespread suffrage and representative governments, he asserts, are undermined by weak leadership and uninformed, thoughtless voters.
Hobsbawm speaks to the crucial need for engaged public intellectuals and the kind of rigorous social and political analysis so well represented by these urgent and important essays.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59558-977-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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