John Cleese’s observation that the English are the only people on Earth with clenched hair is more economical, but...
He might have been a Roosian, a French, or Turk, or Proosian, or perhaps Itali-an: Gilbert and Sullivan aside, the subject of Hitchings’ (The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, 2011) latest is the beleaguered, class-obsessed Anglo-Saxon and the very notion of “Englishness.”
The author opens with the 1977 duel at Wimbledon between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, the latter of whom put a face to the word “ill-mannered.” As Hitchings notes, we have all moved on: Today, “we find McEnroe’s conduct authentic, even courageous, while Borg’s seems that of an android.” Yet McEnroe still speaks to the central point of this book: that rudeness and politeness both stem from the same origin, namely, “twisting one’s way out of discomfiture.” And no one is quite so discomfited as a Briton trying to make sense of the elaborate rules that govern society (see Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean). Though the mores-and-manners school of national description leads naturally to stereotyping and isn’t much used by geographers or anthropologists these days, Hitchings clearly has fun with his subject(s), both the English themselves and the code of conduct that has evolved since the Middle Ages—when, he notes, someone commodiously counseled that “one should not attack an enemy while he is at stool.” Evolve is a useful term here, since, as Hitchings notes, manners are not static. For one thing, “English eating habits have become markedly less predictable,” even if sex remains “a subject mired in hypocrisy, mostly handled with either purity or prurience, often treated in a manner that seems a mixture of the furtive and the fetishistic.”
John Cleese’s observation that the English are the only people on Earth with clenched hair is more economical, but Hitchings’ book, if sometimes overgeneralized, is still a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-26675-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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 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
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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