by Diarmaid Ferriter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2005
An assumption-rattling landmark in modern Irish historical writing.
If Ireland is now the Celtic Tiger, a marvel of the modern world economy, it’s no thanks to many of the nation’s institutions over the past century.
“Wherever we go we celebrate the land that makes us refugees,” runs an Irish pop song, but Dublin-born historian Ferriter is disinclined to laud his homeland unduly. Indeed, he opens his massive survey by announcing uncomfortable themes, many touching on areas of life that have impeded progress and have contributed to a long legacy of misery, such as the apparent unwillingness of government and the wealthy to do anything about poverty. Though not iconoclastic, Ferriter, like his contemporary Roy Foster, demolishes or demotes cherished legends; the supposedly internecine struggle that led to independence, for example, was surely dislocating and terrible, but much less so than previous histories have it. Devotion to mythologized history (and to exaggeration) is by no means exclusive to the Irish, but it plays so strongly that certain realities go ignored; that England was a longstanding enemy did not keep some 70,000 citizens of the officially neutral Irish Republic from joining the Allied forces during WWII, though “it was not until 1995 that an Irish government formally sponsored a memorial to those who had participated,” and of course Irish Catholics have witnessed scandals involving rogue priests that rival those across the water, though that has not stopped young Irish people from being “the most spiritual in Europe,” with 48 percent professing a belief in God, as compared to only 8 percent of their French peers. Even in the wealthy high-tech Ireland of today, Ferriter notes, poverty remains widespread and largely unaddressed, as are other social problems—though, he allows, many improvements have taken hold in the last few years.
An assumption-rattling landmark in modern Irish historical writing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-681-0
Page Count: 884
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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