Much less engaging than one would expect, given the potentially compelling subject matter. (16 pages color photos, not seen)
A study of British women travelers in the 18th century that began as a research file for Exploring European Frontiers (not reviewed). The result retains the feel of a file: some interesting clips, some pictures, and lots of padding.
In Enlightenment England, men traveled, but women generally stayed home. While a little touring and education abroad might make young ladies more marriageable, too much was both anti-British and unfeminine. Nonetheless, a few women managed to confound the era’s constricting mores. Dolan’s early chapters are divided into discussions of travel for the purposes of education, for independence from constraining families and husbands, for health, and for fashion. Many of his subjects were ladies of the court whose duties to the queen had become onerous. Some of them were the famed “bluestockings” who longed to take the same advantage of the continent as their male peers. Letters home, detailing who and what the travelers have seen (and what to pack; Mariana Starke recommends a rhubarb-grater), are the most interesting element here, along with sections relating gossip about who had affairs with whom and whose illicit pregnancies required lengthy stays abroad. The same women appear in nearly every chapter; Dolan (History/Univ. of East Anglia, UK) rearranges their stories to fit his structure rather than organizing his narrative to present them as individuals. This approach makes for a great deal of flipping back and forth in order to keep straight the various Ladies Elizabeth and Mary. Later chapters are notable for pregnant Mary Wollstonecraft’s perceptive and dramatic observations of the French Revolution; she contemplates life and death as well as the politics of revolution.
Much less engaging than one would expect, given the potentially compelling subject matter. (16 pages color photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018543-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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