An exploration of American drinking habits through time from a British scholar of booze. Barr (Wine Snobbery, 1992), a journalist for the London Sunday Times, offers a social history of drink in America, one organized by theme rather than by strict chronology. Throughout, one suspects that Barr never met a drink he didn’t like (at least, that is, as a subject of inquiry), and he defends alcohol as “a means of sharing, of cementing friendship, of defining status, of establishing loyalty, of entering adulthood, of declaring freedom.” Of sclerotic livers and broken homes he has little to say, preferring instead to puzzle over Americans’ puritanical attitudes toward such things as a lunchtime mug or two of brew—a good source of nutrition, he insists—and our insistence on keeping minors away from the Ripple. Supporters of MADD won’t much like Barr’s sensible yet controversial discussion of the flaws of lowering the acceptable blood-alcohol content of drivers, which, he says, will lead only to the creation of a whole new class of lawbreakers and thereby assure that “drink-driving laws will lose credibility”; they will also frown on Barr’s view that a little alcohol every now and then is a good stress-reliever for pregnant women. But collectors of trivia will doubtless admire Barr’s talent for ferreting out oddments of alcohol-related history, such as the English penchant for drinking beer in the place of water (the latter scorned in the class-conscious homeland, Barr writes, because it was free) and the connection between anti-German sentiment in WWI and the establishment of Prohibition. Barr might have done better to write more such history, thus living up to his book’s subtitle, and to spend less time numbering the virtues of John Barleycorn in the face of alcohol’s critics. All in all, Barr’s book makes for good bathroom reading for the family tosspot—and for good talk-show fodder. (b&w photos, not seen), (QPB selection)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0559-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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