Atmospheric, modestly entertaining travelogue.
Yank journalist probes into a series of bizarre, sometimes perilous, competitive and/or commemorative events kept alive in tightly knit British communities.
Some of these spectacles, Daeschner relates, like the Shrovetide football contests held in a number of British towns with pubs—he singles out Haxey—do have centuries of tradition behind them. This venerability allows the author, from his viewpoint as the droll American observer, to speculate on the subtle fact that mass drunken violence is actually organized rather than simply allowed to occur randomly. And when he joins in the scrum—officially known as the Sway in Haxey—for firsthand experience, there’s plenty of leg-breaking and skull-concussing atmosphere, but not much comes by way of explanation as to its origins. The shin-kicking competition in Chipping Campden, on the other hand, has direct connections to a misbegotten, as it were, attempt in 1612 to recapture the glory of the original Greek “Olympicks.” But, unlike downhill cheese-rolling races in Gloucestershire (where no one ever catches up with the cheese), “horn dancing” with a huge rack of antlers tied on or burning the pope (in effigy) in Lewes, other events on Daeschner’s itinerary may simply be figments of modern touristic inspirations in locales that have little else going for them. Bog-snorkeling in the Welsh town of Llanwyrtud would be a prime example of the latter; and, again, the author submerges himself futilely in fetid, bacteria-laden muck to capture the feel and spirit (though that may be too generous a word) of the contest. While the reporting is energetic and exploratory, these situations, packed together, cry out for TV coverage. The author’s attempt in a preamble, however, to integrate them under some sociological compulsion of Britons not to be boring lacks both style and conviction.
Atmospheric, modestly entertaining travelogue.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-656-X
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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