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ON LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS

UNTIMELY THOUGHTS ON CULTURE AND SOCIETY

In seven essays and addresses on postmodern thought, Himmelfarb (Emeritus, History/CUNY) becomes the conscience of contemporary intellectual life. These essays, like the author's Poverty and Compassion (1991), pay tribute to Lionel Trilling's concept of the ``moral imagination,'' of which Himmelfarb offers a consummate example. Her concern: the intellectual arrogance and spiritual vacancy of postmodern literary criticism, philosophy, and history, their denial of reality, of truth, of facts, seriousness, moral issues, narrative, dates, even meaning, enabling them to belittle such monumental tragedies as the Holocaust, which becomes, at best, a pattern, a problem, a symptom, even the subject of comic books. Those deconstructionists or any of the other fashionable theorists whose only reality is language, for whom philosophy is ``play of mind,'' who have substituted aesthetics and rhetoric for morality, betray their disciplines and vocations, Himmelfarb charges. She attacks not only the ``unrepentant Nazis'' De Mann and Heidegger, but also their disciples and defenders—Derrida, Foucault, Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Richard Rorty, Shoshana Felman—for disguising their intellectual and moral poverty behind ``play of mind,'' fashion, and idiosyncrasy. In chapters on Marx and Hegel, on John Stuart Mill and liberty, on the timely and treacherous association between nationalism and religion, Himmelfarb illustrates the perils of confusing the reality principle with the pleasure principle, and indicts the moral lassitude of postmodern intellectuals and the degeneration of values epitomized even in the decline of footnotes. Essential reading for anyone in academic life, faculty or student, who has been exposed to what Himmelfarb identifies as professors with the minds of valets: incapable of appreciating greatness themselves, they deprive their students both of their heroes and traditions. A powerful corrective.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1994

ISBN: 0-679-42826-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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