A welcome addition to intellectual history that restores two gifted women to the scholarly record.
Lively biography of two sisters who made substantial contributions to 19th-century natural history.
Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris were sisters who, writes McNeur, “lived together, hiked together, and debated new scientific theories together.” They were hardly alone in their vocations and avocations. As the author notes, the term scientist came about in 1834 to describe “a woman with a talent for turning complex scientific phenomena into understandable prose for popular audiences.” Some men whom we would now call scientists believed that women were better equipped mentally to ponder the minutiae of classification than men, whose supposed task was to come up with big ideas. Well to do but constrained by their time, Elizabeth and Margaretta turned to botany and entomology. Margaretta, in particular, became well known for her work describing the 17-year cycle of the cicada—and as for big ideas, she corresponded with none other than Charles Darwin, then “an up-and-coming naturalist in England,” on the subject of water beetles. McNeur notes that the sisters may have approved of Darwin’s ideas about speciation and natural selection, even if they also collaborated with the anti-evolutionist Louis Agassiz. The sisters were acknowledged as skilled researchers and observers in their time, although when Margaretta, arguably the more accomplished of the two, passed away, “the Academy of Natural Sciences announced her death…but included no details about her life or accomplishments.” As a result, they were never properly acknowledged nor memorialized, an erasure that may not have been intended, strictly speaking, but that “gradually accumulated until the sisters’ stories faded from view.” Fortunately, in a well-written book that digs deep into the literature, McNeur recovers those stories and places them in the context of a science that, for all its strides forward, took no trouble to include women in the conversation.
A welcome addition to intellectual history that restores two gifted women to the scholarly record.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781541674172
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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