Blum (formerly History/Princeton; the scholarly The End of the World Order in Rural Europe, etc.—not reviewed) offers a detailed, if pedestrian, analysis of a remarkable decade. The 1840's were, Blum says, ``the most amazing epoch the world has yet seen''—because of the geniuses of thought and technology who then came of age. The author devotes the first half of his study to some of these figures. He highlights the pioneers of the railroad, telegraph, and penny-post, among other innovations, arguing that they created a communications revolution that changed the lives of ordinary people and allowed a new kind of society to develop. Blum also details the work of social reformers like Shaftesbury and of radicals like Marx and Proudhon. He outlines a stimulating—though hardly original—critique of the Romantic Movement, showing it as leading to the realism of a Courbet and a Dickins, as well as to nationalism. In the worlds of science and learning, Blum introduces us to giants like Humboldt, Helmholtz, Faraday, and Darwin, plus leaders in modern medicine, the social sciences, and economics. The author then looks at the political changes that took place in the five great European nations: Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Here, again, he concentrates on individuals, making them come alive through his use of humor and anecdote. Blum is no friend of the ancien rÇgime and, at times, he's overly keen to apply a Marxist critique—e.g., in his contempt for the religious motivations of early social reformers and in his reliance on the theme of the rising middle class (when has a middle class not been rising?). Moreover, he passes mechanically from one subject to the next—but, by book's end, readers have been treated to a mass of interesting information and introduced to an assembly of outstanding personages. Thought-provoking, if dry, historical fare for the intelligent nonexpert.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19567-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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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