by Colin Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2005
Imperfect but, still, entertaining and informative.
The history of Paris from “earliest times” until tomorrow.
Jones (History/Warwick Univ.; The Great Nation, 2003, etc.) opens with Julius Caesar and winds through antiquity toward the Middle Ages, giving us town-gown conflict in a Left Bank tavern at the opening of the 13th century to underscore the venerable roots of Parisian students’ obstreperousness. Passing through the Reformation, which shook 16th-century Paris, the narrative finally arrives at more familiar history: divine-right monarchs, Enlightenment, Revolution. Familiar, yes, but Jones provides all sorts of interesting tidbits. Louis XV felt ill-at-ease in the great city; he believed Parisians called him Louis the Well-Hated. During the Enlightenment, Parisians spent about three million livres a year on coffee—even more than they spent on cheese. A sobering look at the 20th century leads to the city’s present-day problems: industrial development, architectural conservation and the relationship between urban center and its suburbs, to name a few. But Paris, the author maintains, is unlikely to be defeated. Jones organizes his history chronologically, but gray-shaded “Feature Boxes” break the chronology to “operate like close-ups, fast-forward anticipations or rewind-retrospections.” For example, the first restaurants appeared on the Parisian scene in the late-18th century. Since they continue to shape Parisian culture, the chapter on the 1780s includes a Feature Box summarizing the history of dining out from then until now. It’s an understandable attempt to circumvent some of the problems with writing such sweeping history, but the boxes seem too gimmicky and are mostly a distraction rather than an embellishment. Meanwhile, the prose is altogether too self-consciously whimsical: apologizing for any of the book’s flaws, Jones demurs that he hopes nonetheless it “will contain enough of interest to manage a Michelin Guide recommendation: vaut le détour.” Finally, it seems odd that so long an overview has so little to say about Parisian women; at the very least, their key role in the French Revolution deserves mention.
Imperfect but, still, entertaining and informative.Pub Date: April 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03393-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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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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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