by Colin Evans ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2001
Everyone loves a good fight, especially on the world stage, and Evans calls these contests with skill and flair.
Arguments that got murderously out of hand, sometimes literally so, zestfully captured here by Evans (Great Feuds in Science, not reviewed).
The squabbles in these pages were for potatoes both big and small—the divine right of kings, say, or the Hatfield theft of a McCoy hog—yet they had staying power because they were balanced fights: The contestants fought at the same weight. Otherwise, the fighting would have been over before the first bell and if there is one thing that links these feuds together it is longevity. The author knows how to write a lively narrative, swiftly paced but always clearly directed. Everywhere there are consequences to pay, both for the victor and the vanquished: Moldy old Queen Elizabeth doesn’t stand a chance against Mary, Queen of Scots, on the popularity front (but that didn’t keep the redhead’s melon attached to her neck). Aaron Burr’s good aim killed more than Alexander Hamilton—it assassinated his own public reputation, as well. Equally malignant was the battle between the Hatfields and the McCoys, which all started with a pig and ended generations later in the Supreme Court. There are the creepy turf wars of Patton and Montgomery that may have directly led to the death of thousands of troops, the ugly little tiff between LBJ and RFK that sent both down in flames, and Hoover’s grotesqueries in his struggle to subdue Martin Luther King Jr. The match between Stalin and Trotsky best sums up the ruinous and tawdry nature of these affairs—the real prize sought by such elephantine egos (i.e., power beyond the scope of all adversaries) was simply too big to be wielded with decency, much less greatness.
Everyone loves a good fight, especially on the world stage, and Evans calls these contests with skill and flair.Pub Date: May 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-38038-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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