A keenly observant, if at times pretentious, exploration of identity politics writ large at the national level. What Lowenthal (Geography/University College, London) calls ``the cult of heritage'' is seen today in historical theme parks; museum and commemorative policy; child adoption; a booming illicit trade in art and antiquities; and most ominously, in xenophobia, racism, and genocide. Frequently heritage involves a national or ethnic trauma that needs to be recalled, such as the Holocaust for the Jews, the Potato Famine for the Irish, and the wars that kept Poland subjugated for years. At times, however, this emphasis sparks a kind of victim politics that brooks no disagreements and can even lead to a cycle of mutual grievances and bloodshed, as in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Unlike history, Lowenthal notes, heritage makes no attempt at objectivity as it views the past with present-minded purpose. Heritage further deforms the past because it is ``popularized, commoditized and politicized,'' in the form of kitschy theme parks like Disney's aborted Historyland and the more ambitious if still somewhat misleading Williamsburg (where management is still uncertain how fully to depict slavery in this colonial capital). Lowenthal is especially canny about heritage as an all-consuming growth industry, noting that Stonehenge is now protected from predatory tourists by barbed wire. However, he has caught more than the net of his argument can reasonably hold (it's a wide range from essentially liberal curatorial issues to the horrors of genocide), and his prose aims for high-flown rhetoric when a little earthiness might have been helpful. Moreover, he never really shows the reader how to separate the wheat of heritage (its function as ``creative act'') from the chaff (the many faults he describes). Still, a provocative examination of how nations worship at, and are sometimes sacrificed on, the altar of memory.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82798-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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 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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
