Bravely drawn popular history: thoroughly researched, muscular with details and rendered in enchanting prose.
Seasoned historian Dallas (1945: The War That Never Ended, 2005, etc.) serves up exquisite slices of Parisian lore.
Twelve Métro stops in the city of lights come blazing to life in this unusual tome. “There are many histories of Paris,” the author writes, “but they won’t fit in a pocket or a traveling sack.” Instead he gives us “little vignettes drawn from Paris’s rich two-thousand year history.” Such a wide-ranging project might fail in lesser writers’ hands, but London-born Dallas, a longtime resident of France, infectiously conveys his love and deep knowledge. From Métro stop No. 1, Denfert-Rochereau, the visitor to Paris can stroll in an area “once called Hell,” considered in the 1800s “the most frightening, deserted part of Paris” (Dallas explains why). From there, he moves on to the Gare du Nord, Métro stop No. 2, and the “charitable mysticism of Saint Vincent de Paul,” who in the 17th century established a group of homes for foundlings that was soon transformed by politicians into “a veritable industry of abandoned children.” Métro stop No. 3, the Trocadéro, was the stomping grounds of Dr. Otto Rank, “one of the great heretics of the psychoanalytic movement,” a disciple and later a critic of Freud, and the lover of Anaïs Nin. Métro stop No. 7, Châtelet-Les Halles, is a place frozen in the late 19th century for any reader of Émile Zola’s novel Le Ventre de Paris. Claude Debussy’s scandalous life and his friendship with Marcel Proust are interwoven with a riveting history of the Paris Opéra (Métro stop No. 9). The final stop is Père Lachaise, the largest of the city’s cemeteries, where Dallas intertwines the last years of Oscar Wilde and the imprisonment of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the subject of France’s most notorious miscarriage of justice. A recommended reading list rounds out this gripping guide for the intellectual tourist.
Bravely drawn popular history: thoroughly researched, muscular with details and rendered in enchanting prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1695-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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