A riveting story of individual tragedy and national disharmony: Hoff and Yeates burden the tale with far too much detail (it...
Witches, fairies, murder, political mayhem, and courtroom theatrics: this seemingly unassuming case history from late 19th-century Ireland contains enough drama to compete with the biggest Hollywood blockbuster (cf. The Burning of Bridget Cleary, p. 926).
What should have been a rather ordinary tragedy—young Bridget Cleary, village seamstress and wife of the local cooper, contracts a serious illness (likely tuberculosis) and looks to die an early death—became a litmus test in the highest political circles for the possibility of Irish Home Rule. That is because Bridget Cleary's tubercular condition was believed by several relatives and neighbors to be a case of fairy possession—and her ritualistic treatment for fairy possession began as a series of herbal remedies, escalated to physical threats and violence, and, finally and fatally, resulted in the intentional burning of her body. In a time when Ireland was already torn between Catholic and Protestant sentiments, the case of Bridget Cleary made it painfully clear that the Old Religion—fairy craft—had not been abandoned by many of its rural dwellers. The endurance of this superstitious religion was taken up by English and Irish politicians antagonistic to the notion of an Irish nation independent of English governance. How, it was argued, could a backward country that still practices witchcraft and believes in fairies possibly be granted sovereignty? Hoff (History/Ohio Univ.) and Yeates (History/Indiana Univ.) recount the subsequent murder trial of those who tortured and killed Bridget Cleary, and the resulting political and religious implications this case held for a struggling Ireland.
A riveting story of individual tragedy and national disharmony: Hoff and Yeates burden the tale with far too much detail (it takes almost 100 pages of dense, Irish history before Bridget's story even begins, and unnecessary footnotes make for confusing reading), but it has all the ingredients of the best murder mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-03087-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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