Taken all in all, however, an illuminating work of scholarship by a skilled and savvy historian. (14 maps, not seen)
The venerable British historian (A History of Europe, 1997, etc.) explores the labyrinth of our century, from 1901 (“a world deeply unlike our own”) to the Clinton impeachment and the Kosovo conundrum.
Roberts acknowledges that this formidable piece of scholarship, synthesis, and exposition is “a reconsideration of facts established by others,” then moves gracefully and seamlessly across continents and cultures, through decades and debacles, to produce not a snapshot of the 20th century but a comprehensive album of deeply moving pictures. Weighty enough to bend the sturdiest shelf, his volume nonetheless reads easily (thanks in part to many emollient subheadings) and presents, for the most part, a disinterested view. Roberts’s great strength as a narrator is his ability to identify the cultural myths that people embrace, myths that have inspired as well as retarded human progress. He reminds us, for example, that the concept of nationhood is a fairly recent one, and though it has helped map the modern world, it has also proved inadequate in many unstable parts of the globe, like the Balkans and the Middle East. Roberts is careful to consider many far-flung areas, and thus we learn not only about the origins of the great European wars, the emergence of the US as a global power, and the fall of European Communism, but developments in China, the Indian sub-continent, Korea, Japan, and Africa. At times Roberts states the obvious (he reports that the Internet provides a “personal mail system”); at times he cannot conceal his own biases (he characterizes the bizarre 1982 Falkland War as “a major feat of arms”); sometimes he is insensitive (he condemns the “stridency” of American feminists); and sometimes he simply errs (he blames Eugene rather than Joseph McCarthy for the Communist witch-hunts).
Taken all in all, however, an illuminating work of scholarship by a skilled and savvy historian. (14 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88456-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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 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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