A valuable study for students of the law and its evolution over the millennia.
A worldwide survey of legal history that draws on a vast repertoire of texts and traditions.
Pirie, a professor of the anthropology of law at Oxford and a specialist in Tibetan culture, notes that even among the nomadic peoples of the high Himalayan plateau, legal codes have developed to determine who can use a given patch of grassland and speak on behalf of their band. “Small communities the world over have made laws to regulate internal affairs and maintain a sense of distinctiveness and autonomy,” writes the author. Still, for all the esoteric legal traditions out there, such as the rules of beekeeping codified by Irish monks, societies tend to develop most of their fixed rules at the state level, and as Pirie notes early on, local traditions have tended to give way to international orders: “The national legal systems now found throughout the world are almost all modeled on those developed by European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” In an agile though somewhat overlong history, Pirie begins with Hammurabi, whose legal code expanded beyond “pragmatic and mundane rules” to become a body of laws that justified state power but also gave people an ordered place in Babylonian society and attendant rights. The author argues convincingly that the best legal traditions are those in which rights and responsibilities are reciprocal, helping people, in the case of that Mesopotamian legal code, “navigate complex social relations in a society divided into different social classes and professions.” Subsequent legal developments have codified what constitutes fair trade, what legal rights the citizens of a state can expect to enjoy, and the like. In the modern era, Pirie concludes, international laws continue to proliferate, often surrounding highly complex issues such as how to regulate the internet, if at all.
A valuable study for students of the law and its evolution over the millennia.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1794-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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 2026 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.
