The diaries of Clark, who held cabinet positions under British prime ministers Thatcher and Major from 1986 to 1992, have already caused something of a sensation in the UK. An old Etonian aristocrat and intellectual, Clark is a belligerently witty observer of the high echelons of British life- -and also a sentimental and self-pitying one. The diaries, covering 1983 to 1991, span the bulk of the Thatcher years. His relationship with Thatcher is marked by a strange mixture of awe and skepticism. In one of the book's most peculiar scenes, the PM asks (i.e., orders) Clark to move from heading the Ministry of Trade to serving in the Ministry of Defence under Tom King, whom he loathes. Determined at first to put up stiff resistance, he finally accedes- -with a limpness that amazes himself—to the irresistible force of the Iron Lady. The British, of course, love this kind of incestuous, almost coded gossiping. Clark is always amusingly prickly. On an official trip to Morocco, where he is berated by his hosts about ``Suleiman Rushdie,'' he wonders, ``Can't we swap him for Terry Waite?'' Elsewhere, he is the frankly nostalgic aristocrat, son of Lord Clark, keeper of Saltwood Castle in Kent, bemoaning the erosion of his class. In one entry, he notes that once the entire British Empire was run by the same number of bureaucrats as currently staff a single department. In another, he laments the poverty inflicted on the upper classes by death taxes and by the rising expectations of the ``lower classes,'' all of which makes having servants terribly expensive. Happily, this kind of oblivious High Toryism is redeemed by style, wit, and suave disdain for vulgarity. A dash of scholarship and good intellectual breeding produce a very good read that betrays a sensitive and morbid intelligence. Clark's observations of British political life are acute and his gossip hilarious.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-13917-2
Page Count: 421
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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