Timely and provocative, with case studies and conclusions that are sure to come as news to most nonspecialist readers.
Of Satan’s imps, wasting sicknesses and mass hysteria: a careful account of the occult and its discontents from ancient days to the present.
Best known as a chronicler of the colonial era, Demos (History/Yale Univ.; Circles and Lines, 2004, etc.) recalls a bout in graduate school with the witch hunts at Salem and elsewhere, which led to an early monograph. This more synthetic account examines the European roots of that episode while acknowledging that there is scarcely a culture anywhere that does not have a category of person who believes that he or she is especially attuned to the otherworld and able to manipulate it—and some category of person whose sworn duty it is to oppose such interventions. As Demos observes, in antiquity it was the Christians who were accused of cannibalism (thanks to the metaphor of carnal sacrifice in the Mass) and black magic; in early Lyons, France, good polytheists dragged Christians professed and suspected from their homes and administered frontier justice accordingly. The Christians returned the favor when it came their turn to rule. Demos reckons that, by the medieval era, the societies that were most susceptible to witch hunting on an organized basis were “small, chronically struggling state entities” with like neighbors, mistrustful and ever watchful for enemies within, especially those who might be associated with the devil. Strong centralized governments, conversely, tended to suppress anti-witch hysteria. France, for instance, saw little witch hunting in the early modern period save on the periphery, in places such as Brittany and Normandy. In Europe, he reckons, 100,000 to 200,000 witchcraft trials were conducted, and thousands died. In America, the numbers were fewer but the punishments just as severe. Demos traces witch hunting into the present in a political guise: the Red Scare, McCarthyism and so on.
Timely and provocative, with case studies and conclusions that are sure to come as news to most nonspecialist readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01999-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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