Reminiscent in approach and substance of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and...
“Somewhere in France, in some village, on the column of a war monument somewhere, one name is engraved that should not be there.”
Le Naour (History/Univ. of Aix-en-Provence) offers an engrossing account—whose English publication is well timed to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the conflict’s outbreak—of a French poilu of the Great War who lost his memory and, in effect, his life somewhere on the battlefield. This man was discovered wandering in a railroad yard near Lyon on February 1, 1918, before the war’s end, apparently one of a convoy of paroled prisoners coming home from Germany. He had no knowledge of who he was or how he had come to be there; he could not even remember how to eat. “At police headquarters,” writes Le Naour, “he is shaken, cursed, accused of faking, and threatened with court-martial.” Finally, from some deep recess of memory, he produced the name Mangin, though he could not say why. The man dubbed Anthelme Mangin was then taken off to a hospital, and then to a psychiatric asylum, where he would up reside until his death in 1942. Claimed from time to time by would-be family members (some, but far from all, apparently interested in Mangin’s pension as a wounded veteran of war, for he was “in the maximum-benefits category”), Mangin became a symbol of “the living unknown soldier,” and eventually contested in yet another way: some from his time believed that there could be only one unknown soldier, the one buried beneath the Arc de Triomphe, even though, as Le Naour observes, “from 1914 to 1918, more than 250,000 soldiers vanished, leaving no trace beyond the notice of their disappearance in action.” Mangin’s identity was eventually discovered, writes Le Naour, but small matter: he is utterly forgotten today, as surely as if he had never lived.
Reminiscent in approach and substance of Michel Foucault’s I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother . . . and Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre: a thoughtful and highly readable work of history.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7522-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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