Not a page-turner, but Atkinson’s balanced account justly gives its heroines their due and captures the jolly spirit with...
History of the only two women permitted on the military front during World War I.
Women’s-labor historian Atkinson (Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, 2004, etc.) tells the impressive life stories of Elsie Knocker and Mairi Gooden-Chisholm. Elsie was a 30-year-old divorcee in 1914 when she left her seven-year-old son with her parents and convinced her motorcycling companion Mairi to join the war effort. Mairi was an 18-year-old tomboy from a good Scottish family that moved in royal circles. Her mother was horrified when Mairi followed Elsie to the Women’s Emergency Corps headquarters in London, where they were recruited by the liberal Dr. Hector Munro for his Flying Ambulance Corps. What began as a post shuttling wounded Belgian soldiers from the battlefield soon became a legacy of work for which they received numerous medals and international fame. The mercurial Elsie liked to be in charge, so she and Mairi, whose more even-keel temperament was a necessary complement, set up their own first-aid post at Pervyse, in northern Belgium. In addition to providing food and friendship, they treated wounded Belgian soldiers on or near the battlefield before carting them to hospitals miles away. This approach, now standard in EMT practice, combined with their perseverance and fundraising savvy, allowed them to become wartime media darlings, the “Angels of Pervyse.” Visits from King Albert and Marie Curie and Elsie’s second marriage to a Belgian Baron added to the element of glamour that marked their lives in Pervyse. Still, they endured the less-exciting experiences of treating venereal boils, bandaging mangled faces and making due without plentiful supplies of food and water. Their foreign service ended in 1918, when the Germans gassed their post twice, to devastating effect, and both women returned to Britain.
Not a page-turner, but Atkinson’s balanced account justly gives its heroines their due and captures the jolly spirit with which they carried out their work.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-094-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Borderland/Ivan Dee
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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