Fascinating subject, so-so treatment.
Before electricity became the driving force of civilization, the public had to come to terms with this new power. Here’s the story behind it.
Simon (English/Skidmore Coll.; Genuine Reality: A Life of Henry James, 1998, etc.) draws on 19th-century newspapers, popular fiction, and other nontechnical sources to examine how electricity was understood, promoted, feared, and exploited. While magnets and static electricity were known to the ancients, no one began to systematically investigate electrical phenomena until the Enlightenment. When Luigi Galvani made frog legs twitch with an electric shock, the public imagination leapt to make a connection between electricity and life itself. Mesmerism (hypnotism), originally called “animal magnetism,” became a fad in the late-18th century, and Romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe were quick to seize on its sensational implications. But not until the 1840s did the telegraph first put electricity to work in the world. Many in the public, working from analogy with animal magnetism, at first believed that actual thoughts were being sent along the wires, a confusion that took a long while to die out. A similar confusion between electricity and the supposed vital force that characterized living beings led to the development of “electrotherapy,” a method of treatment promoted by George Beard, a Yale-educated physician whose ideas were supported by Thomas Edison, among others. Beard and his followers prescribed mild electrical shock as a cure-all, but its use was especially recommended for neurasthenia, the Victorians’ term for depression. Meanwhile, Edison was building a reputation as a wizard, in fierce competition with George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. A key battle took place over the use of the electric chair, promoted by Edison (with exceedingly mixed motives) as a new, “humane” method of execution. At the end of the century, the discovery of X-rays—beneficial, but harmful when overused—opened new vistas of medical science. Simon dutifully touches all the bases, but fails to strike any sparks.
Fascinating subject, so-so treatment.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100586-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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