An expert researcher brings the romantic Raj era to colorful life.
A British biographer finds lively fodder from the accounts of Victorian women venturing to India to find a spouse—and the men who scooped them up.
De Courcy (Snowdon, 2010, etc.) fleshes out the stereotypical portrait of the wilting English gentlewoman who functioned chiefly as a means of perpetuating the imperial status quo across the British empire. The women she chronicles in this vigorous study, sent to India to find a husband mostly during the Raj period (roughly 1850 to 1950), faced hardships with equanimity and purpose. Fortunes were to be had for the intrepid young men who flocked to India to work in the East India Company, Indian Civil Service, and other trading, government and army ventures, although diseases and an unfamiliar climate rendered their work perilous. The depletion of the marriage pool back in England left many English girls, those without fortunes, beauty or good connections, facing spinster futures during a time when marriage largely defined women, who had few other prospects. However, in India, men outnumbered women four to one, de Courcy estimates, increasing a woman’s chances of finding a mate. Yet these were not passive women, and as the author delves deeper into their diaries and letters, she finds that voyaging to India allowed many women an exciting outlet they did not have in England. However, the arduous voyage took many months and required hardiness, as did weathering illness and oppressive heat. After hasty marriages to eager, lonely men, the wives were often obliged to pull up stakes and move constantly as their husbands’ jobs required or live out in the jungles where their plantations were located. Moreover, they often faced long separations from their children, sent back home to boarding schools. De Courcy offers numerous, richly detailed accounts.
An expert researcher brings the romantic Raj era to colorful life.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229007-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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