Impressive scholarship applied to a fascinating episode.
A riveting account of a horrific murder in 19th-century Ireland that is also a scholarly analysis of culture, politics, religion, and mythology.
Bridget Cleary, a young housewife in rural Tipperary, was burned to death by her husband Michael in the presence of relatives and neighbors on a spring day in 1895. Bourke (Irish/University College, Dublin) sorts through conflicting court records and journalists’ accounts to discern exactly what happened. To explain why it happened, she explores the rich, imaginative oral tradition still alive in Victorian Ireland. English was replacing Irish, and literacy, uniformity, and central authority were gaining sway. But many people, particularly Ireland’s numerous illiterates, continued to believe in fairies—powerful entities who could spirit away a wife and leave a deceitful changeling in her place. This creature, folklore maintained, could be banished by burning, and the true wife’s return could be secured through certain rituals. In such a world, Michael Cleary’s act becomes understandable—but, on the other hand, the crime can be also seen as a frustrated, angry husband’s act of domestic violence against a too-independent, possibly too-flirtatious wife. Bourke places the story of Bridget’s burning in historical context, showing how the event was seized by those in England opposed to Irish Home Rule as evidence that the Irish were too savage to govern themselves. Further background to the times is provided by her account of another scandalous affair involving an Irishman that same year: Oscar Wilde’s libel suit against the Marquess of Queensbury and his own subsequent trial, conviction, and imprisonment. Bourke’s knowledge of English and Irish political history, her sympathetic understanding of Irish folklore, her meticulous descriptions of the life and ways of the landless poor, the authority of the Catholic church, the court’s procedures, and the workings of the prison system all make for an extraordinary look at the Ireland of a century ago.
Impressive scholarship applied to a fascinating episode.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89270-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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 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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