Humorous and literate, if incomplete.
The conclusion of an entertaining three-volume hopscotch through English history, this one taking us from John Locke to Francis Crick.
Veteran historian and biographer Lacey (Grace, 1994, etc.) maintains the appealing conversational style of his two earlier installments. He juxtaposes the sublime (Waterloo, the Battle of Britain) with the criminal (highwayman Dick Turpin, murderer Dr. Crippen), the culturally or socially significant (Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, the rise of trade unionism) with the alarming and/or disgusting. He writes about nasty stuff floating in the Thames, and the squeamish should avoid his graphic paragraphs about the brutal breast-cancer surgery, sans anesthesia, endured by novelist Fanny Burney in 1811. Many of the selections offer no surprise: the Charge of the Light Brigade, the reign of Queen Victoria, the abdication of Edward VIII. But there are quiet and unexpected entries, too: the origin of the word “Luddite,” the publication of 1066 and All That (a book he greatly admires), the inventive 18th-century farmer Jethro Tull. It’s odd that Lacey doesn’t mention the rock group that adopted the farmer’s name, perhaps slightly less so that he neglects to tell us about Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen, which unsuccessfully attempted to turn an Edwardian murder into a 1960s West End musical. And the text contains occasional errors. Mary Godwin did run off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, but not, as the author says, to marry him; they were joined in a London church two years later in the presence of her father. Lacey includes some witty surprises—e.g., John Locke once attended the autopsy of a lion—and he offers a sly allusion to Wellington’s pulling on his boots.
Humorous and literate, if incomplete.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-11459-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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