An unexpectedly prescient cautionary tale.
A relatively obscure scandal from Eastern Prussia in the mid-1800s foreshadows several aspects of current sociopolitical polarization.
Königsberg was the professional home of Immanuel Kant, many bridges, and a stage of Napoleonic ambition and defeat. It was also, between 1835 and 1842, the setting of an uproar against two clergymen that escalated from the community square to the halls of government and heralded the division and defensiveness that dominate discourse almost two centuries later. Lutheran pastors Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel faced accusations that they were drawing followers into a religious sect marked by unorthodox scriptural interpretation, questionable metaphysical understanding, and debased sexual appetites. Historian Clark’s compact text accentuates the various factors that swelled four years of accusation of, investigation into, and response from Ebel and Diestel into such a scandal: outsized personalities and egos, particularities of Königsberg’s small and tight-knit community, class and gender divides that fueled affiliations and accusations. Military, political, and legal details of early 1800s Prussia may seem a historian’s indulgence, but the author curates them to emphasize the “atmosphere of incipient culture war” that spawns the drama of his subject. Protestant-Catholic tensions were heightened, post-Enlightenment rationalism and scientific discovery were squaring off with religious revelation, and the very institutions of religion, state, and family faced redefinition. Within this milieu, fear, skepticism, and the strict demands of belief systems redefined and realigned were weaponized with hyperbole and desperation, and each camp drew strict lines to guarantee clarity and uniformity. Clark does not panic or browbeat. Rather, his studied focus on the specificity of the scandal in Königsberg allows each reader to consider how cults of personality, sensational accusations, performative outrage, and unyielding beliefs might undermine or endanger not only individual livelihoods, but also the deeply human pursuits of spiritual fulfillment, community, and power.
An unexpectedly prescient cautionary tale.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798217060948
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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