Young, award-winning British political columnist for the Guardian (The Iron Lady: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher, 1989, etc.), offers an exhaustively argued, and sometimes scathingly contemptuous, account of the misgivings, policy blunders, and deceptions that accompanied Britain’s descent from imperial power to European Union member. In Britain, in rapid decline after WWII as a colonial power but with its industrial capacity and institutions intact, and the sole unambiguous European victor of the war, attitudes toward European unity were more ambivalent than on the continent. Britain settled into a pattern of vacillation that has persisted to the present day. Young traces the evolution of the “European idea” from its genesis as a half-serious daydream of Winston Churchill’s to the euro-ready entity of Tony Blair’s era. At all times, the author argues, British leaders were consistent in their inconstancy, publicly arguing for European unity while often privately ignoring and pointlessly resisting the seemingly inexorable British devolution into the European orbit. Britain resisted entry into the economic community until 1973, after the basic structure of the European polity had been created without her leadership. This resistance was typical, says Young: —ultimately, Britain did choose the fate her leaders long resisted or failed fully to embrace—but only after a period of time in which much opportunity was, by sheer lapse of time, wafted.” While Young, an apparent Europhile, attacks Euro-ascetics like Ernest Devin and Michael Portillo as purblind, the proponents of British integration into Europe do not receive gentle treatment, either—he charges that the consent of the British people was never sought even as aspects of national sovereignty were being surrendered, a process that he calls “subterfuge most foul.” In the end, Young asserts, the British political class failed its people all around, with long-range consequences for Britain and Europe itself. A provocative and contentious work, bound to be controversial but clearly essential to the reader who seeks to understand the evolving politics of the European Union.
Pub Date: May 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-939-8
Page Count: 543
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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