Read this illuminating book to see frightening similarities to the early years of the 21st century. The lies, innuendo,...
The author of Zola (1995) and Flaubert (2006) once again demonstrates his profound knowledge of French history, its people and their psyche.
Brown’s Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (2010) showed France’s struggle from the revolution into the Third Republic. Here, the author digs even deeper in the fight for minds beginning with the effects of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The rise of xenophobia after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine was as much an indication of anti-Semitism as anything else. The Third Republic, with its revolving door of ministers, only exacerbated the rise of extremists. Maurice Barrès, a dedicated Boulangist, was radicalized by the Panama Canal Company scandal and the Dreyfus Affair, and he blamed the Jewish syndicate. Together with Charles Maurras, he founded Action Française, a monarchist newspaper that attempted to destroy every political adversary with slander campaigns. As editor in chief, Léon Daudet completed the unholy trinity devoted to yellow journalism, using fear as the weapon of choice. His youth organization, the Camelots du Roi, was only one of the militant leagues that turned demonstrations into blood baths. The onset of World War I further fed the young intellectuals’ fears and obsessions, and Joan of Arc became their symbol of patriotism. Men like Pierre Drieu, who marched to war with the works of Nietzsche in his knapsack, and André Breton led the surrealists in their quest for the annihilation of being. Brown explores all the great and complicated minds of this period, including socialists, communists, fascists, royalists and radicals. Francophiles will love this book, but the roiling currents of philosophical and political ideas may daunt some readers.
Read this illuminating book to see frightening similarities to the early years of the 21st century. The lies, innuendo, invented evidence and baseless arguments are all too familiar.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-59515-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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