This history of sex work is titillating but poorly organized, and it fails to offer a compelling argument.
A chronological history of prostitution in London.
A more accurate title for this book is A History of Prostitution in London, Plus Oscar Wilde. Arnold does indeed address Wilde’s famous trial, as well as Regina v. Penguin Books, which allowed Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in England. For the most part, though, the only kind of sexuality addressed is that offered in exchange for money. The book is organized chronologically, which unfortunately means that several opportunities for a more thematic analysis are lost. For example, Arnold discusses both the 1749 erotic novel Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1928, but since they were written centuries apart, the author does not analyze their publication and reception together. Similarly, Arnold describes the early Roman Londinium attitude that “while brothels were regarded as a healthy outlet for the male appetite...patrician wives and daughters must be paragons of chastity,” and the Victorian middle-class belief that “the majority of ‘respectable’ women did not enjoy performing their conjugal rites,” yet never analyzes the ways in which cultural perspectives on marriage and female sexuality were tied to the demand for sex workers across historical eras. One theme in the book is the chasm between the sexual behavior of the ruling classes and the behavior they expected from, and often legislated in, the lower classes, but this is more an observation than an argument. The presence of footnotes, a bibliography and an index give this book a semi-academic sheen, but this is not a work of scholarship so much as it is a digestion of the research of others repackaged for a popular audience. As popular nonfiction, it will satisfy readers looking for a salacious historical read, and the scholarly apparatus will enable especially curious readers to do more research.
This history of sex work is titillating but poorly organized, and it fails to offer a compelling argument.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60034-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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 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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