A lively and edifying narrative with lessons for today.
In her first book, Purnell gets our nerve endings tingling with an exploration of the interplay of mind and body as seen through the lens of the Enlightenment.
The author, a history instructor and “lover of bizarre facts,” presents 10 episodic chapters plumbing the effects of 18th-century ideas and technologies on human culture. Of particular interest are her considerations of the philosophes, polyglots whose studies were not confined to formulating esoteric principles but rather practical applications, girded by the Enlightenment's belief in human perfectibility. For Purnell's purposes, the 18th century is defined as the period from 1690 to 1830, a time when societies were fascinated with every aspect of the senses, often ascribing to us more than the five basic ones recognized today. Purnell demonstrates how Enlightenment thinkers, building on new theories of the brain and nervous system, began with the premise that all we have of knowledge derives from the uses of our senses and then avidly pursued an understanding of their relationships to each other. The author presents the senses as a complex weave, and her book, a fine companion to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses (1990), is by turns thoughtful, quirky, and richly—sometimes excessively—detailed. It can be surprisingly moving, as in the chapter chronicling the rise of philanthropic societies, which created a dramatic shift in the way the handicapped were viewed, reflecting the Enlightenment's impulse to engage all citizens in society. Purnell effectively scrutinizes modern perceptions of the Enlightenment as a time wholly dominated by reason and the scientific method. She also examines the dark side of the era's theories of physical perfectibility while reacquainting readers with Enlightenment thinkers both famous and forgotten. If not all of her arguments are convincing, they remain succinctly rendered: “The senses not only allowed access to pleasure, but they also lifted Nature's veil, allowing humans to understand the deeper patterns of the world.”
A lively and edifying narrative with lessons for today.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24937-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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