The latest offering from the distinguished scholar and diplomat (The Great Melody, 1992, etc.) is a brief collection of his Massey Lectures, delivered at the University of Toronto and over the CBC Radio. O'Brien opens these talks in a somber mood, quoting Yeats's ``The Second Coming,'' with its apocalyptic imagery, and Michelet's description of the approach of the year 1000, an event that kindled unprecedented hysteria. From there he moves into a cogent, mordant analysis of an (un)holy alliance between the papacy and fundamentalist Islam to roll back the Enlightenment. O'Brien is nothing if not candid about his own feelings: ``I frankly abhor Pope John Paul II,'' he remarks at one point. Regrettably, it's downhill from there. In the subsequent lectures, he wanders all over the place, reaching sometimes dubious conclusions. There is a lengthy and ill-judged attack on Thomas Jefferson that combines a cynical and mechanistic reading of Jefferson's motives in the French Revolution and on the slavery question with a shocking dismissal of virtually all of Jefferson's writings. One essay is devoted in large part to a somewhat ill-formed discussion of the role of the arts in a democracy. In another, O'Brien argues unconvincingly that the death of the British monarchy would be a fatal blow to Western values. There is even the obligatory attack on PC and multiculturalism, an attack that O'Brien himself seems to admit is irrelevant to the minimal threat that PC extremists represent to democracy. Throughout the talks, O'Brien keeps shifting his ground uneasily, simultaneously extolling the Enlightenment values that democracy embodies while raging against the proponents of those values. A disappointing effort at a time when clear thinking about democracy is essential.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-874094-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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