An evocative, critical work of cultural history that brings the near past alive.
The subject of this book should draw in American readers interested in modern life, Paris, French society, and modern print and film culture.
Paris in the first half of the 20th century was an exhilarating wonderland packed with delightful elements of culture and society: the Metro, Debussy, Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Proust, the Moulin Rouge, courtesans, haute couture. All of it brought “a feeling of lightness and joie de vivre, implying a universe of shared pleasures,” so writes Kalifa (1957-2020), former director of the Center for Nineteenth-Century History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon–Sorbonne, in this appealing, scholarly cultural history of the Belle Époque. That the era’s very name summons images of Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Leslie Caron is part of the author’s story. So is his portrayal of how the era’s imagery “flowered” and fueled a kind of “Parisian triumphalism” well into the 1960s. Those images, he argues, are indelible parts of how we view the French capital even today and play a role in France’s well-known current emphasis on heritage and “patrimony,” in which this book now assumes its own place. So appealing were images of the Belle Époque that the Nazis succumbed to them during their 1940s occupation of France while the French, condemned later for doing so, used them to please their occupiers. That’s the academic current underlying the narrative—its depiction of the reality that culture’s use and recollection can be as significant as culture itself. American readers, especially those who came of age after World War II, will quickly call up Toulouse-Lautrec posters on their walls and memories of first touring Paris. Kalifa gives those memories historical footings and explains their origins, providing a useful, informative portrait for scholars and Francophiles alike.
An evocative, critical work of cultural history that brings the near past alive.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-231-20209-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
HISTORY | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | MODERN | WORLD
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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