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THE SCOTTISH NATION

1700-2000

A comprehensive, lucidly written history of Scotland, a nation that despite its small size has had a disproportionate impact on the world’s intellectual and industrial development. Scotsman Devine, Professor at the University of Aberdeen, has taken on the ambitious task of chronicling the last three centuries of Scottish history. He skillfully explains the origins of the 1707 Act of Union, which transferred Scottish legislative authority from Edinburgh to Westminster. Devine details the “national security” context behind England’s decision to incorporate Scotland into the UK. England was embroiled in her own constitutional crisis, having just banished the Catholic Stuarts and welcomed the Protestant William of Orange as her new king. Right on England’s doorstep, Scotland was considered a dangerous “launching area” for pro-Stuart, pro-Catholic rebellion. In order to persuade Scotland to agree to the Act of Union, Westminster made two important concessions: “noninterference” in the Scottish religious establishment and free trade for Scottish merchants in all of England’s territories. It proved to be a beneficial arrangement. By the mid-18th century, Scottish trade was booming, as she shipped linen and tobacco throughout the British Empire. In addition, Scotland became a center of the European Enlightenment. Scotsmen like Adam Smith, David Hume, and James Watt helped make Edinburgh a global center of learning. Blessed with natural resources, Scotland became the “little giant” of the industrial revolution. By the mid-19th century, Glasgow was an industrial boomtown, though one with immense overcrowding problems. Scottish heavy industry, especially shipbuilding and steel, was the engine that helped fuel British expansionism. But WWI and the ensuing postwar Depression devastated Scottish industry, and with the coming of WWII, Scotland moved towards a Welfare State model of governmental intervention. When Margaret Thatcher reversed this postwar trend, the Scots balked. In 1997, Scotland approved a devolution referendum, effectively returning legislative authority to a new Scottish Parliament. A must read for anyone interested in Scotland’s history.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1999

ISBN: 0-670-88811-7

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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