An above-average addition to the when-the-modern-age-began genre.
Did the modern world begin during World War I, in 1945, or perhaps with the steam engine in the 1700s? British historian Wilson (What Price Liberty!: How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost, 2009, etc.) makes an engrossing case for the dozen years after 1850.
That year marked the onset of a boom triggered, according to the author, by the free market that followed Britain’s abandonment of mercantilism and tariffs in the 1840s. Wilson begins in 1851 London, where the Great Exhibition drew enraptured crowds to a dazzling display of world technology (“a day at the Exhibition meant sensory overload”). Although dominated by Britain, there were unexpected hits from the United States, as well—e.g., Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, vulcanized rubber, and the Colt six-shooter. After this initial introduction, Wilson delivers 15 largely unrelated chapters on great midcentury events. The telegraph and railroad, after two decades of modest growth, exploded across the world and under the oceans, beginning a revolution in high-speed transport and telecommunications that is still in progress. An avalanche of gold, more from Australia than California, greased economies. Against their wills, Japan and China joined the world market as Britain and Russia built Asian empires—but not without early versions of another modern phenomenon, genocide, in India and the Caucasus. The U.S. boomed as it dissolved into civil war, which barely interrupted its expansion. The 1860s saw the U.S. replacing Britain as the center of attention in a world that “has been utterly transformed by war, mass migration, economic boom, advancing trade, and the impact of new technologies.” In his epilogue on the 1873 depression, the worst in history, Wilson emphasizes that the 1850s jump-started the modern world, which is more convenient and prosperous than the old but no nicer.
An above-average addition to the when-the-modern-age-began genre.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06425-0
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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