The title suggests a Fabian and the bulk makes one wary that it's arxian sociology all over again. As one reads, however, all thoughts of sectarian vanish. True Professor Thompson makes a to-do about class-consciousness nourishing the Tree of Liberty, but that's understandable in light of the subject, and besides for him class-consciousness is not a determinist dogma, but the way in which "experiences are handled in cultural terms". Thus while he uses his considerable scholarship and unperplexed and persuasive style to explore the foreshadowings and the effects of the Industrial Revolution from the late 18th century to the early 19th, it is done from the vantage point of the total-life expression of the working-class, i.e. all the religious, social, political, economic and psychological aspects involved are rigorously pursued and rounded off. In addition, he manages to connect number of modern issues, for instance, giving the lie to the modish liberal-realism of Snow saying the poor "walked off the lands into the factories as fast as the factories could take them". The poor did no such thing, they knew better, living in a frightful time with God and Mammon in each other's pockets: pressures towards regimentation extended from the factory, on the one hand, and the Sunday school, the other. "The praise of Jehovah", said Blake, "is chanted from lips of hunger and thirst"; "Laws grind the poor", said Goldsmith, "and rich men rule the law". The passages on these and other poets, incidentally, are another indication of the Look's breadth. They illuminate the many-sided nature of a rebellious, tempest-tossed era as much as do the complementary considerations of Paine, Pitt, Cobbett and Owens, of Jacobinism, Chartists, Radicals and the Luddite march on the power. Really a thumpingly fine performance.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0140136037
Page Count: 1937
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964
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 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
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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