A rarefied and compelling study.
A dense, thoughtful study by a Mauritius-born native achieves the right distance from and intimacy with his subject.
While sharing enormous sympathies with the French language and culture, Hazareesingh (Politics/Balliol Coll., Oxford; The Legend of Napoleon; In the Shadow of the General, 2005, etc.) also maintains his academic reserve. In a series of scholarly essays, the author probes the intellectual currents that have fed that distinctive esprit français since the time of Louis XIV to the more pessimistic present. Indeed, the Grand Siècle saw not only the apotheosis of absolute monarchy at Versailles, dazzling intellectual salons, fashion, and cuisine, but also the epoch of Descartes, the philosopher who set out the rationalist tug of war between mind and matter, soul and thought that would plague and elate the French ever since. The author looks at how the writing of Descartes was appropriated by many different, conflicting parties over the centuries, from Christian to anticlerical to feminist, but celebrated as the “emblem of republican rationalism” that would triumph with the French Revolution. French thought is nothing if not contradictory, and while the Enlightenment thinking ushered in a “detached, skeptical and critical self,” Hazareesingh also emphasizes the long French flirtation with the occult and supernatural, culminating in President François Mitterrand’s obsession with astrological predictions. Fantasies of utopia, from Rousseau to Victor Hugo, dovetail nicely with the French proclivity for scientific inventiveness, precision, and accuracy, while the concepts of left and right that rupture French politics to this day are deeply rooted in the French Revolution. Naturally, the cult of Napoleon garners its own chapter. The new pessimism that the author attempts to articulate seems to emanate from France’s acute awareness of its slipping relevance in world influence—certainly next to the English language and American culture—and a deep anxiety over immigration and its ruling elite.
A rarefied and compelling study.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-03249-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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