Writing primarily for other historians, Murrin provides some interesting insights but on topics too narrow to be of much...
Murrin (Emeritus, History/Princeton Univ.; co-author: Liberty, Equality, Power, 1995) presents 11 previously published essays on the periods just before and after the American Revolution.
That Revolution meant the loss of much of a North American empire recently secured by Britain's 1763 victory over the French and their Native American allies. A recurring theme in the author's consideration of this era is the question of how this unified empire came so completely unglued that civil war erupted in little more than a decade. The answer, writes Murrin, drawing on the work of the neo-Whig school of historiography, lies only partly in the political intransigence and incompetence of successive British ministries. More fundamentally, it amounted to a failure of imagination on both sides, an inability to create a new conceptual framework for the empire that would permit the colonists to participate fully in self-government as their English cousins did. In other essays, the author explores such topics as the contributions to the Revolution of the Great Awakening and the fall of French Canada, the evolution of American nationalism and how it compared to Confederate nationalism in the Civil War era, the rise and fall of a Federalist ruling class, and a surprisingly timely discussion of an obsession with corruption in the politics of the early republic. Murrin concludes with a survey of schools of American historiography that have arisen over the past two centuries and how they have successively fallen through exhaustion, refutation, or "self-immolation." The author focuses on testing the theories of preceding generations of historians against one another, probing for weaknesses and observations of enduring value. The format makes some degree of repetition inevitable. The author's style is scholarly but leavened with occasional dry wit, and he offers his own arguments in a spirit of humility and collegial conciliation.
Writing primarily for other historians, Murrin provides some interesting insights but on topics too narrow to be of much interest to general readers.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-503871-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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