by Catherine Bailey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 30, 2014
The real value of this work is in the recounting of the ends of two classes, the lower and the very upper.
TV producer and director Bailey (The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery, 2012) uses the downfall of the Fitzwilliam family to examine the history of the coal industry in England.
The author’s remarkable story primarily covers the time of the seventh Earl of Fitzwilliam, who inherited the title in 1902. She shows how class differences and the effect of two wars, strikes and the final blow of the postwar Labour government brought down many of the aristocracy. The Fitzwilliams lived at Wentworth House, one of England’s largest privately owned homes. Bailey uses accounts of the miners and their families to describe both the lives of the wealthy Fitzwilliam family and those of the poverty-stricken laborers. Low pay and long working days were hard enough, but when times were bad, the corporate mine owners cut pay and shortened the work week. After World War I, German reparations included providing free coal to the European victors, undercutting the English market and halving the earnings of the miners. The Fitzwilliams, especially the seventh Earl and his wife, were particularly well-liked, as they continued a feudal tradition of caring for their workers. “Lordie,” as he was known, insisted on maintaining the latest safety measures. During the long coal strike of 1926, they fed all the local children, organized games, created work on their other estates and even provided coal. The ruin of Britain’s stately homes and the end of coal as a primary industry were due to the steam engine, better transport and refrigeration, as well as the increase in inheritance taxes from 15 to 50 percent. Wartime nationalization of the mines and sequestration of estates served as the final blows. Gossipy bits—e.g., questioned legitimacy, grand entertainments and “Kick” Kennedy’s marriage to the Devonshire heir and subsequent affair with the ninth Earl—keep the reading lively.
The real value of this work is in the recounting of the ends of two classes, the lower and the very upper.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0143126843
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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PROFILES
by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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