Yet another history of millennialism and prophecy belief, shallow but a cut slightly above its peers. One of the strangest claims in Weber’s usually on-target chronicle is that millennialism is understudied and “for so long ignored in modern times.” The recent onslaught of books on the topic, many of which Weber seems to have read, testify to the contrary. Weber’s book does stand out for a couple of reasons. First, since he is a historian of early modern Europe (UCLA), Weber’s analysis is heavy on continental sources and refreshingly constrained on American millennial groups, though he does briefly round up the usual suspects (Millerites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) The book is strongest when grounded in the author’s own apparent area of expertise: France in the 18th century. Weber’s study also begins in a memorable way, with an intriguing opening discussion of the very concept of a century. Weber notes that the idea of marking time in centuries dates only to the 17th century and didn’t become popular until the 18th, so the notion that belief in apocalypse has always been tied to a millennial year is anachronistic. Weber is a terrific writer for an academic, coining fun new words such as “billennium” for the year 2000 and “the enserfed” for the heathen masses. But such mellifluous prose seems wasted on this overhyped, tired topic. The book spreads itself too thin, attempting to function as a “travel guide” through 2,000 years of (mostly Christian) millennialism, from St. Paul to the Nation of Islam. In journalistic fashion, Weber skips lightly from one example to another without exploring the deeper histories of these movements. Certainly entertaining, but Weber’s obvious skill is squandered in this superficial treatment of a hackneyed subject.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-04080-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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