For now, then, no matter. Read this for the writers—Alcott, O’Connor, Frost, Jewett—and if you tire of them, read 20 others....
Who and what made New England the nation’s intellectual and literary center is apparent in this expansive collection of writings by the abiding masters and luminaries of the day.
To illustrate the nuances of the “hope and disillusion, confidence and self-doubt” that inform the New England mind, Delbanco (The Real American Dream, 1999, etc.) divides the selections into several sections. In each, writers explore the attitudes and characteristics that came to define the region: an ideal of justice, an intolerance of newcomers, and a “proprietary intimacy” with the land. Delbanco offers John Winthrop and Samuel Danforth as exemplars of the self-approbation behind “The Founding Idea.” In the “Education” chapter, John McPhee describes the career of a Yankee schoolmaster, and an account is given of Harvard president Charles Eliot’s restructuring of the American university. The New Englander’s discontent with worldly imperfection is illustrated (in the “Dissident Dreamers” chapter) by the spectacle of John Quincy Adams arguing the Amistad case before the Supreme Court, and by A. Bartlett Giamatti’s unquenchable faith in the Boston Red Sox. The collection contains some old chestnuts (such as Emerson’s “Nature”), but it also has some real treats (such as the radio comedian Fred Allen’s hilarious defense of his local paper, The Cape Codder). The abundance and sureness of the writing is comforting, as it intimates a limitlessness of New England creativity—but the paucity of contemporary contributions may suggest otherwise. The few living writers excerpted (e.g., John Updike, Geoffrey Wolff), compared to the feast of authors from the past, gives the collection an elegiac feel—and raises the question of whether today’s mobile society can establish a regional literary heritage.
For now, then, no matter. Read this for the writers—Alcott, O’Connor, Frost, Jewett—and if you tire of them, read 20 others. This is a smorgasbord; we are unlikely to see its kind again soon. (9 halftones, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00603-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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