Well-written and heartfelt—a worthy companion to its obvious inspiration, John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956).
UK Prime Minister Brown (Moving Britain Forward: Selected Speeches, 1997-2006, 2006, etc.) considers eight political mavericks who fought for righteous social causes, often sacrificing their lives.
Four of his subjects are of unquestioned global stature: Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Nelson Mandela. Four, perhaps lesser known, quickly prove worthy of Brown’s scholarship. Edith Cavell innovated nursing practices during World War I and helped many Allied prisoners escape from occupied Belgium; she was eventually court-martialed and shot. German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer resisted the Nazi regime. Cicely Saunders single-handedly upgraded standards of palliative care for the terminally ill and developed the hospice idea. Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest in Myanmar since 1989, won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy of democracy and nonviolence. Occasionally, the book benefits from Brown’s personal acquaintance with his subject. His affectionate profile of Mandela, for example, is full of refreshing insights into the South African leader. Other chapters—such as those covering Wallenberg, King and Kennedy—are not groundbreaking, but they do convey the author’s sense of reverence and respect; readers learn as much about Brown’s worldview as about the people he depicts. The generous inclusion of correspondence, first-person interviews and other primary-source materials invests each meticulous profile with an air of authenticity. Brown consistently demonstrates the lucid, unwavering, objective eye of a historian, detailing all the frustrations and errors of his subjects, whose character flaws he is unafraid to point out. His portraits do not sanctify sociopolitical icons; instead they celebrate ordinary men and women called to extraordinary feats in the service of causes that stirred their passion.
Well-written and heartfelt—a worthy companion to its obvious inspiration, John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (1956).Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60286-022-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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