by Ellen Wayland-Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2016
A smartly contextualized tale of “the tension between radical social critique and unapologetic accommodation...between...
A study of the unlikely origins of one of America’s most recognizable brands.
For many, little bears the white, middle-class stamp of approval of monogamy more than the timeless wedding gift of silver. But Wayland-Smith (Writing/Univ. of Southern California), great-granddaughter of the former vice president and treasurer of Oneida Limited, unearths the eyebrow-raising history of the rural New York free love–espousing community that spawned one of this country’s top silverware makers. Founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Community brought together a tightknit group of Christian religious dissenters who, for 30 years, pooled their assets and lived as one in a “commune-cum-capitalist powerhouse.” Wayland-Smith carefully details the rich biography of Noyes, the fascinating sex-obsessed theologian who had his minister’s license from Yale Divinity revoked after he began subscribing to Perfectionism, the belief that a sinner could “not only reform himself by making the right moral choices but also be made ‘perfect’—free from sin—simply by accepting God’s grace.” Finding the traditional definition of Christian marriage too confining, Noyes proceeded to fashion his doctrine to practice eugenics and allow for—indeed to celebrate—completely open relationships, which had the somewhat unintended effect of dissolving (for a time) the strictures of traditional 19th-century gender roles for women. Oneida women were able to undertake the same jobs as their male counterparts and encouraged to shun the restrictive, corseted stays of Victorian dress for more practical attire. The narrative is occasionally dry, but the author offers as in-depth an account as possible of Oneida origins, given that, in 1947, unknown persons burned the community’s historical records in an attempt to purge the by-then well-respected industrial giant of its racy past. The spotlight she shines on this remarkable community’s beginnings and ending offers a riveting glimpse into the quintessentially American early-19th-century struggle with the rights of the individual and separation of church and state.
A smartly contextualized tale of “the tension between radical social critique and unapologetic accommodation...between communal harmony and individual striving.”Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04308-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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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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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