A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.
A writer born in Northern Ireland examines the stories of women who disappeared without a trace in 1990s Ireland.
Between 1993 and 1998, eight women disappeared 80 miles outside Dublin in a “safe and welcoming country where bad things don’t really happen.” Exploring these disappearances, all of which took place during the author’s adolescence in Northern Ireland, McGowan recalls that no one ever discussed these missing person cases. She only stumbled upon them when she was doing research for her own crime fiction almost two decades later. In 2000, when a 24-year-old woman was found murdered near Dublin “in a populated area and in broad daylight,” McGowan felt compelled to investigate crimes that occurred years before. She discovered the women were a heterogenous group with no connection to each other. Yet those she talked to about them almost invariably asked if they were involved in sex work. “Think about what it means, that question—that we expect a certain type of woman to go missing, to be murdered,” she writes.” While police had worked on the cases for three years, the author discovered that in one case, it took them three days to start looking for the missing woman. She also learned that one woman who had barely escaped from a brutal rape and attempted murder in Dublin’s “vanishing triangle” saw her attacker, a husband and father others considered “a decent man,” released from prison five years before the end of his sentence. McGowan surmises that the “savagery and speed” of the ambush suggested a man who knew what he was doing. Yet he was never investigated further for possible connection to the eight disappearances. Readable and thought-provoking, this book reveals that despite efforts at modernization and liberalization, Irish systems of justice and power remain as patriarchal as they are complicit in maintaining a centuries-old culture of silence, suppression, and misogyny.
A chilling book of true crime featuring important social issue concerns.Pub Date: May 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3529-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
From veteran British popular historian Johnson, an overly exhaustive account of the vigorous and violent growth of several small British colonies into the modern American nation. Although Johnson (The Birth of the Modern, 1991, etc.) purports to present the history of the "American people," his account has an undeniably British orientation; No details can be found here of the cultures of pre-European inhabitants of North America or the history of areas not originally settled by British colonists, such as Louisiana or the Southwest. Johnson divides his account into eight periods, of which some dates seem dubious (one might question dating America's career as a superpower to 1929, the first year of the Great Depression). More troubling, though understandable in a book of this encyclopedic scope, are the author's omissions and occasionally provocative assertions. In his account of the Civil War period, for instance, Johnson fails to discuss the militarily significant Western War, and he asserts, contrary to most accounts and without much apparent authority, that Abraham Lincoln didn't love his wife and didn't like Secretary of State Seward. Johnson traces not only the military, but also the political, social, and cultural history of America. He treats such disparate topics as the poetry of Walt Whitman, the developing role of women in American society, the growth of vast business combinations in the early 20th century, immigration and urbanization, the Vietnam War, and the 1973-74 "putsch against the Executive" (which is what Johnson calls the Watergate scandal). He editorializes on virtually every subject, sometimes controversially. Noting the many problems faced by modern America, Johnson concludes nonetheless that "the story of America is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence." A vast tour-de-force of research and writing. Nonetheless, Johnson tries to do too much here, and the overall result is as much of a labor to read as it must have been to write.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-016836-6
Page Count: 944
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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