Brisk and well-written, continually directing our attention toward contemporary analogues.
Chronicle of the 1894 bombing of an upscale Parisian café, which set a deadly pattern for the subsequent quarter-century and beyond.
Merriman (History/Yale Univ.; The Stones of Balazuc, 2002, etc.) begins with Émile Henry (1872–94) packing a metal lunchbox with dynamite. “This book is motivated by a very simple question,” he writes. “Why did Émile Henry do what he did?” The answer involves enormous social and economic inequality that the author sees still flourishing today. Echoing John Edwards, Merriman describes “two cities…the ‘People’s Paris’ of the east and the increasingly chic neighborhoods of the west.” Henry, a young intellectual whose straitened family circumstances prevented him from getting a higher education, was disenchanted with the corrupt bourgeois society he saw around him. He turned to anarchism, a philosophy that declared “whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant,” and advocated violent resistance to the state. There had been anarchist bombings, including one of a police station by Henry, before he threw his handmade explosive into the Café Terminus on February 12, but their targets had been government officials or the wealthy; this was a random attack on ordinary people. Chased in the streets by a waiter and several passersby, Henry was collared by a doughty gendarme, pummeled and taken to the local police station. He spent his days in custody reading Zola, Dumas, Spencer and Dostoevsky. Even his most bitter opponents, notes Merriman, were impressed by his articulate and confident, even arrogant, speeches during his trial. Nonetheless, judgment was quick, followed by an appointment with the “national razor.” Henry became a martyr to those believing in “propaganda by the deed”; one month after his execution, a knife-wielding anarchist killed French president Sadi Carnot. Anarchist attacks on individuals and public places terrorized Europe and America in the years before, during and immediately after World War I.
Brisk and well-written, continually directing our attention toward contemporary analogues.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-618-55598-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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 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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