A fresh look at an influential political activist.
The story of a man committed to transforming the landscape of the new world.
Besides being a gadfly, political theorist, and enormously popular pamphleteer, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was an architect, determined to design an iron bridge, economically crucial, over the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. Gray (History/Florida State Univ.; New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America, 2014, etc.) sets Paine’s engineering project against a backdrop of political turmoil as the Colonies struggled for independence and responded to the French Revolution. In 1775, the prospect of breaking ties with Great Britain generated fierce controversy. “To separate from the United Kingdom,” many colonists thought, “was to challenge the political wisdom of centuries,” which held that a “hereditary monarchy [was] the only way to political stability.” Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, contested that view, and within a year, up to 150,000 copies were circulated, with huge impact. Over the next six years, he followed with a series of 13 essays called The American Crisis, exhorting Americans “that theirs was the just cause” and bolstering the morale of beleaguered troops. Paine never grew wealthy from his writing, always returning profits to his publishers to ensure continued printings. As much as he inspired his countrymen, he incited detractors, and by the 1780s, he sought to break with his radical past. “The quiet field of science has more amusement to my mind than politics,” he declared. But although he poured his energies into designing an iron bridge, he could not fully break from politics: Rights of Man appeared in 1791, with a printing of between 100,000 and 200,000 in three years. The Age of Reason was published in 1794; “among the fiercest attacks on organized Christianity ever written,” it earned him new enemies. Although the author repeatedly shifts the focus to Paine’s engineering project, he inevitably returns to the more compelling facts of Paine’s political career.
A fresh look at an influential political activist.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24178-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
