An outstanding book of travel and history.
A somber, gracefully written evocation of a place that has been called the most beautiful spot on earth.
Debut author Moreton is, he is quick to say, neither Irish nor American, but instead an English journalist who stumbled on a good story while on an Irish holiday. That story was the long, sorrowful history of the Blasket Islands, the most distant of which, Tieracht, is “a jagged pyramid of rocks . . . which was said to provide the last sight of Ireland for ships heading to America.” The Blaskets sheltered a small population of fishermen and herders who retained medieval customs well into the 20th century and who, speaking a pure strain of Irish, “had a divine gift for the spoken word and an ability to recall the events of ancient times as though they had happened yesterday.” This linguistic and narrative prowess did not keep the people from starvation and want, however. When a young islander collapsed and died on Christmas Eve 1946, far away from any priest or doctor, the residents of Great Blasket (which lacked even a working radio) demanded that the Irish government provide aid to improve their lot. Although, Moreton writes, Irish President Eamon de Valera and several parliamentarians took up their cause, in the end they offered little more than words. A couple of years later, the people of Great Blasket and the surrounding islets decided to abandon the place, as if it had betrayed them one time too many. Some of those islanders moved to the mainland; many others moved to America, where they and their descendants nurse dreams of returning to the Blaskets, which are still little visited today.
An outstanding book of travel and history.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89207-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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