An altogether excellent look at the Victorian era, with all its flaws and glories.
A brilliant evocation of a generation that, at least for the English, is both very much alive and has “vanished totally.”
Over the course of just a few decades in the 19th century, England grew from regional force to global power as it was remade from “a primarily rural community governed at local level paternalistically, at a national level aristocratically” to “an industrial country governed nationally by plutocrats, locally by bureaucrats.” A noted novelist (Dream Children, 1998), biographer (Jesus: A Life, 1992), and historian of ideas (God’s Funeral, 1999), Wilson ably crosses genres to give readers a portrait of the Victorian era that blends eminent lives with big events and ideas, all delivered in a fluent narrative. Born in 1950, he writes, he belonged to the last English generation that could know this bygone world as “an almost remembered oral tradition” through the anecdotes of elderly compatriots who had been alive during Victoria’s reign. Where those tales conflict with received history, Wilson rolls up his sleeves and hits the archives to correct either the anecdote or the historical record. His cast of characters numbers in the hundreds: Dickens, Darwin, Dodgson, and Disraeli are but a few of the Ds, and even Dostoyevsky makes an appearance, though perhaps to be indexed under another Wilsonian theme, the Death of God. Settings range from the high streets of London and England’s provincial capitals to slums, wharves, crofts, and factories. Wilson links all these stories, scenes, and players together with some well-defended generalizations, including a few that would do Marx proud: he doesn’t just state the obvious fact that “the fortunes of the Victorian millionaires, the mill-owners, the mine-owners, the engineers and the speculative builders were founded on the suffering of others,” he immediately adds, “nor was this suffering accidental.”
An altogether excellent look at the Victorian era, with all its flaws and glories.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-04974-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
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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