A well-composed survey, but more summary than original interpretation.
A scholar of French literature and culture traces the troubling history of Catholic intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism during the last decades of 19th-century France.
With the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, Napoleon III’s abdication and the subsequent civil agitation during the Paris Commune, reactionaries in France were pushing hard for ascendancy. Brown (Flaubert, 2006, etc.) looks closely at the time period in terms of the moral, intellectual and cultural fabric of the nation. France did not separate church from state, as underscored by the Catholic Church’s round condemnation of “depraved fictions of innovators” such as the publication of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus in 1863, which depicted Jesus as a Romantic hero. By the early 1870s, the Church was in revival, eager to “to forgive France her crimes,” and embarked on a shrine to “national salvation” in 1873: Montmartre’s Basilica of Sacré-Cœur. Brown traces the careers of significant leaders on both sides, including provisional president Louis-Adolphe Thiers, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, who served as president of the Third Republic under a program of “moral order”; Republican chief Léon Gambetta; and General Boulanger, the nostalgic embodiment of “France bold and triumphant.” While France presented a face of modern innovation to the world in the form of successive Exposition Universelles and the Eiffel Tower, undercurrents of ugly anti-Semitism were being fed as the far right scrambled for scapegoats after the crash of the Union Générale in 1882, the Panama scandals in the following years and, of course, the infamous Dreyfus Affair. Brown subtly foreshadows the path toward the Vichy regime, but adds little to the scholarship about this explosive period in French history.
A well-composed survey, but more summary than original interpretation.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26631-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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