by Giles Lytton Strachey ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 1990
Sparkling conversational history: six well-researched, amusing, even lightweight biographical portraits of British Victorians that add up to a portrait of the age itself. Lytton Strachey's elegant sneer of 1918, Eminent Victorians, effectively relegated Victorian culture to a knicknack shelf, dismissed by any self-respecting intellectual. Now English man-of-letters Wilson, author of the fine Tolstoy (1988) and Hilaire Belloc (1984) biographies, etc., counteracts Strachey's "sniggering" by presenting six different Victorians who turned society's ideas upside down. Among the six are three whose otherwise vivid portraits Wilson mars by easy psychologizing: Charlotte Bronte, whose enduring success he attributes to her sad life; Josephine Butler, who campaigned successfully against a law that encouraged police to force the examination of any woman for veneral disease, and whose passion for social reform Wilson attributes to the death of her young daughter; and John Henry Newman, whose conversion to Roman Catholicism inflamed the English intellectual world, and who tempts Wilson into speculation on Newman's homoerotic inner life. Each biography, though, is also informative and places its subject firmly within the age: e.g., that of William Gladstone, who liberalized politics; Prince Albert, who gave us the "traditional" Victorian Christmas and the educated monarch; and pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (Wilson at his most lively and witty), a great-aunt of Virginia Woolf's who always traveled with coffins for her entire family. Quixotic, religious, reforming, eccentric—typically Victorian and immensely readable in Wilson's light, discursive takes.
Pub Date: July 30, 1990
ISBN: 1153604175
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1990
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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