An invigorating work of social and literary history, its learning lightly worn.
Vivid portrait of the writers who launched American literature.
In 1834, writes retired publisher Nichols, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord, Massachusetts, just at the time that he was “on his way to national celebrity for his lectures and essays.” He and his new neighbor and friend, Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, firmly rejected the divinity of Christ, a stance that might have gotten them drawn and quartered in Puritan New England but had plenty of sympathizers in the swelter of “abolitionists, freethinkers, feminists, vegetarians, animal-rights activists, teetotalers, and literary lights” who dominated the discourse. Entering the scene were the painfully shy Nathaniel Hawthorne, the forthright Herman Melville, and the spirited Henry David Thoreau (whom Hawthorne described as “ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners”). Most of the writers shared a genteel poverty, Thoreau being so desperate that he briefly took a job in New York City before deciding that he couldn’t stand urban life and retreated to build his famous cabin at Walden Pond—on property owned by Emerson, as it happens, the best off financially of the lot, who allowed the construction even though he had tired of “Thoreau’s obstreperousness.” For his part, writes Nichols in an elegant turn of phrase, “Thoreau transcended Transcendentalism,” a pioneer of the “American Renaissance” of the 1850s, which saw the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and of course Thoreau’s Walden. Each book revolutionized literature—though, as Hawthorne noted with green envy, Louisa May Alcott outsold them all with Little Women. Nichols is a thoughtful reader of these texts, and he turns up interesting details that are not widely known, from Emerson’s certainty that “the white ‘race’ was destined to dominate the earth” to Thoreau’s making his cabin available as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
An invigorating work of social and literary history, its learning lightly worn.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781668094877
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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