A superb illustration of how the personal is the political and can be the universal.
Irish journalist and critic O’Toole offers a chronicle, personal and historical, of the profound changes that have come to his homeland in his lifetime.
“The transformation of Ireland over the last sixty years has sometimes felt as if a new world had landed from outer space on top of an old one,” writes the author, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and Irish Times. Since his birth in 1958, the fundamental character of Ireland as a poor, rural backwater left out of the postwar European economic miracle has changed. Ireland became a hotbed of economic activity in which, as elsewhere, those who were not prepared for the technological world were left behind, though lately the island has slipped back into post-boom quietude. Things were good while they lasted, writes O’Toole: “The boom…was a giant machine for sucking in borrowed money that the Irish used mostly for buying bits of the country from each other at ever more inflated prices and, when they ran out of bits of Ireland, doing the same with bits of other, sunnier islands.” Nonfinancial changes also came swiftly, as a kind of uneasy peace has taken the place of civil war in the northern counties under British rule, and Ireland has acquired a cultural sophistication that goes beyond the “hysteria and self-caricature” of Riverdance. Interestingly, O’Toole writes, for a nation that was once conservative and Catholic, religion is less central than before, and liberal reforms have been made in such realms as abortion rights and same-sex marriage. “When I was born, there was no future and now there is no future again,” he writes near the end of his astute analysis. He argues that this is positive, since it allows for a nondogmatic, adaptable approach to whatever comes as opposed to “the pretence of knowing everything and the denial of what you really do know,” a knowing return to his title.
A superb illustration of how the personal is the political and can be the universal.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63149-653-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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