A well-researched history of the passion to possess.
Loving things.
Historian Delbourgo examines the changing role of the collector in our cultural imagination, from ancient looter to modern-day hoarder. Motivated by a desire for wealth, knowledge, prestige, and, not least, order, collectors have amassed objects such as artworks, scientific specimens, religious relics, books, and gems. Delbourgo traverses time and place to portray collectors’ roles: In premodern China, a collector was seen as a person of superior sophistication; in Korea, collecting was a path to attaining status. Some artifacts—religious relics, for example, or African art—have been sought for their spiritual or magical power. Romantics saw collecting as an expression of one’s inner self, an idea that persists, even as collecting has been associated with colonialism, looting, and profit. Collecting, Delbourgo asserts, also has been associated with mental illness. Fictional collectors, such as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, behave maniacally; Freud diagnosed the urge to collect as an expression of suppressed neuroses. Art collectors have been depicted variously as gloomy, gothic recluses, as figures associated with danger and unabated passion, and as libertines, while naturalists—Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alexander von Humboldt, to name a few—are more likely celebrated for their dogged pursuit of scientific specimens. Delbourgo casts a wide net to offer biographies of collectors such as Rudolf II, a Holy Roman emperor who aspired to assemble the world in miniature; Marie Antoinette, known as the “trinket queen”; Alfred Kinsey, who collected data about sex; and female collectors, notably, Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Peggy Guggenheim, motivated by a pursuit of beauty and “nourishment of the soul.” In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association included hoarding disorder in its updated manual. As Delbourgo amply reveals, however, the distinction between the ardent collector and the pathological hoarder is hardly clear.
A well-researched history of the passion to possess.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780393541960
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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