A scholarly look at more than two centuries of varying interpretations of what it means to be human.
British historian Bourke (History/Birkbeck, Univ. of London; Rape: Sex, Violence, History, 2007, etc.) focuses on Anglo-Americans and Haitians, the former for their perceptions of cultural and ethnic outsiders, and the latter as an example of a subjugated people who revolted against their white colonial overseers and established a black republic. In examining the various distinctions made between human and nonhuman creatures, the author turns to the image of a Mobius strip, a one-sided surface with no beginning or end, for she finds the boundaries between human and nonhuman just as indistinguishable. All criteria for dividing human from nonhuman—e.g., language, intellectual ability, use of tools, possession of a soul or belief in God—are seen to be inadequate, but humanity's continuing and futile efforts to make such a demarcation is "the greatest driving force of history and also the inspiration for systematic violence.” Bourke ranges widely, looking at the denial of full humanity to women, children and nonwhites, at the arguments for and against the rights of animals and at the problems posed by the radical biotechnological techniques that have enabled the merging of human and animal cells. Her writing is dense and demands close reading, but the black-and-white drawings and photographs are often showstoppers, even stomach-turners. Among them are illustrations comparing the face of an Irishman to that of a dog, and of a Negro slave being boiled alive, and photographs likening the slaughter of pigs to the Holocaust. Historians and philosophers may be engaged, but this is much too weighty for casual readers.
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58243-608-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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