Swift, simple, unremarkable. (9 maps, 4 line illustrations)
A brisk and cheerfully traditional trip through our history, from Homo erectus to George W. Bush.
Davis (ret., History/Univ. of Pennsylvania) is cautiously optimistic in this view of our past. In a piece of poetic piffle that serves as an epilogue, he writes, “The world’s still cruel, that’s understood, / But once was worse. So far so good.” He tells us immediately that he will be slighting women (after all, he says, much of history is like a Shakespeare play—all parts played by men) and ignoring much that was minor. This results in a highly conventional chronicle: migrations, explorations, and discoveries, wars, revolutions, and politics. The arts didn’t survive the final cut, except for some analysis of prehistoric cave paintings and Greek drama. Neither does he find much space for popular culture, though he devotes five pages to the rise of McDonald’s—about the same amount he allows for the French Revolution. Last century’s world wars get more thorough treatment, as does the Holocaust. He tries valiantly to particularize, sometimes to great effect. We learn that in 1991 some women offered to bear the child of the frozen 5,000-year-old “Iceman” just found in the Alps. He tells us that Galileo’s blindness may have come from his staring at the sun through a telescope. These details add flesh to the skeleton of flitting history. The author does stake out positions occasionally: using the atomic bomb against Japan was probably a good idea; invading Iraq last year was probably not. Davis’s tone is so light that he sometimes miscalculates (must we be reminded that the pyramids had a burial function?). And at times he brushes up against the controversial, as when he points out the benefits of imperialism (better railroads and schools). He strives mightily to appear impartial regarding the claims of various religions, although he does not call Joseph the father of Jesus. No, Joseph was the man who raised Jesus.
Swift, simple, unremarkable. (9 maps, 4 line illustrations)Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-051619-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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