Rich chronological account of the English capital’s seamier side, from the dreaded footpads of the 18th century to the organized crime syndicates of the 20th.
Linnane (London: Wicked City, 2004) turns a scholarly eye on the various rough characters who have scraped (or shoveled) a dishonest living from the streets, alleys and racecourses. There's no shortage of material; London had no organized police force until the mid-1800s, so for much of the city’s history crooks operated with a great deal of freedom. Citizens had to rely on thief takers—bounty hunters, essentially—who trapped and turned over criminals for the reward. Linnane begins with the most famous of these: Jonathan Wild, “the original Godfather,” a double-dealer who was as pleased to be bought off by the thieves as turn them in. This age also saw the rise of footpads, gangs of thieves who quite willingly murdered their victims to make good an escape on foot. Schools of vice like Fagin’s establishment in Oliver Twist were quite common, and pickpocketing seems to have been endemic in the crowded London streets. Linnane explicates underworld slang, from highwaymen and garrotters to rookeries and peelers. He also traces the rise of London’s gangs and their charismatic leaders: Jack Spot, Billy Hill, the Sabinis and the Kray twins, all intent on running the city’s rackets. The author carefully places each event and character in context, leading to some redundancy, but with so many criminal empires and aspirations to keep straight, it’s a forgivable fault. A lengthy bibliography and extensive index make the work more than just a sightseer's romp through 300 years of slums.
Dense and informative: a book to keep on hand when reading any kind of period literature that touches on London’s dark side.Pub Date: July 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-86105-742-3
Page Count: 372
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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