Slapdash and unilluminating.
Psychoanalyst Strozier (History/John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, 2001, etc.) assembles a scattershot account of 9/11 and its social significance, the release of which is timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
The book draws on interviews with those who witnessed the events of 9/11 firsthand, the author's own account of these events and reported statistics about the physical destruction and environmental damage wrought by the disaster. Many books have been written about 9/11, and many have incorporated the accounts of eyewitnesses. Strozier's book theoretically provides the added benefit of an experienced psychoanalyst's interpretation and analysis of such accounts. Unfortunately, the author's conclusions are generally less valuable and insightful than they are obvious—9/11 tapped into people's fears of apocalyptic nuclear disaster; 9/11 was more traumatic for New Yorkers than it was for Iowans—or irrelevant (Strozier lengthily chronicles his feelings about his son's stalled career as a chef). Further, the prose is jargon-heavy and often feels forced—e.g., “My discussion of the traumatic meanings of 9/11 in this context of the zones of sadness does not try formally to locate my analysis in the academic or psychoanalytic literature on trauma.” Strozier watched the events of 9/11 unfold from the relative safety of Greenwich Village, and he did not lose anyone with whom he was close. Despite his repeatedly asserted desire to show sensitivity toward those who suffered more than he, readers may find it difficult not to find his book self-indulgent.
Slapdash and unilluminating.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-231-15898-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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