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ONE WORLD DIVISIBLE

A GLOBAL HISTORY SINCE 1945

A wide-ranging, utterly absorbing history of our times. With an ironic nod to political correctness, Reynolds (Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942—1945, 1994, etc.) owns up to being a —white, middle-aged Englishman— whose —limited and personal view— of the recent past is open to argument. It would take a careful scholar, however, to gainsay Reynolds, a Cambridge University historian who packs an astonishing wealth of information into this whopper of a book. Moving easily from fact to fact, Reynolds looks into the political upheavals, demographic transformations, technological advances, and cultural forces that have shaped the world since the end of WWII—and shaped it, he reckons, in ways that press the planet away from unity and amity, toward ever-increasing fragmentation. The reigning divisions of the last few decades, Reynolds writes, are many. One is the widening not of the East-West division of old, but of the North-South moieties of rich and poor nations. Another division, more pervasive still, is what Reynolds describes as —the attempt to relate territorial boundaries to global and religious groupings——to make states and nations one and the same thing. Yet another is the insistence of human beings on differentiating themselves by matters of belief, religion, skin color, and class. Through it all, Reynolds is a jet-setter of a narrator, taking readers from the Kremlin to Zimbabwe, from the Great Wall to Antarctica, to chase down examples of human brilliance (the development of the standardized transoceanic shipping container, to name one oddly fascinating case) and human folly (the rise of so-called creation science in the face of the new physics and cosmology and the old logic). The past half century has been volatile, unpredictable, bloody, and unsettling. Reynolds’s account attempts to make sense of it all—and does so exceedingly well.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-393-04821-7

Page Count: 860

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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