Compelling social and legal history.
Scrupulously scholarly but accessible study of how witchcraft was experienced in a 17th-century German village.
Robisheaux (History/Duke Univ.; Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany, 1989) employs the techniques of microhistory, delineating the multiple layers in everyday lives as he recreates the chilling “social drama” of a small community’s response to crisis. When new mother Anna Fessler suddenly took ill and died after eating her neighbor’s Shrove cake on February 20, 1672, the general outcry in the southwestern town of Hürden was that the miller’s wife, Anna Schmieg, had poisoned Fessler through witchcraft. Offering butter cakes to neighbors was a routine courtesy before Lent, yet the gruesome death of a seemingly healthy woman, coupled with Schmieg’s troublesome reputation among the villagers, created suspicions that prompted the involvement of the district of Langenburg’s court adviser, the local executioner and various university scholars, enlisted for their opinions on how to proceed. Schmieg was an outsider; she had moved into the district when she married the miller, and records show her frequently at odds with the neighbors. Known to be a drinker, she lost two of her many children in suspicious mill accidents and had a difficult relationship with her daughter Eva, who had delivered the cakes to Fessler. Indeed, the court adviser would exploit animus between mother and daughter to implicate Schmieg and generally wear her down over eight months of incarceration, interrogation and torture. She eventually confessed to 15 crimes. Although contemporary legal consultants argued that the case had been based on “conjecture and presumptions,” the Langenburg court saw Schmieg’s execution as necessary to restore the breach in public order. On November 8 she was torn with hot irons, then strangled with a rope; her body was “burned to ashes.” Robisheaux’s work offers a fascinating way of understanding witchcraft “at the level where real life was lived.”
Compelling social and legal history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06551-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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