A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland’s fraught quest for independence.
A historical true-crime tale revisits three notorious Victorian-era murders that shocked Britain and dealt a body blow to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland.
In painstaking and sometimes-harrowing detail, journalist Kavanagh examines the fatal 1882 stabbings of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Britain’s Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, in Phoenix Park in Dublin. Five men—all with ties to the American-funded terrorist group known as the Invincibles—were tried and hanged for the crimes. A sixth, who had turned queen’s evidence, was instead put on a ship to South Africa, giving rise to an Agatha Christie–esque twist involving disguises, fake identities, and a shipboard murder that caused Queen Victoria to write in her journal: “Well-deserved, but shocking!” The attacks were a fateful setback for a secret “truce” being pursued by Prime Minister William Gladstone and Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell, whose mistress and her husband acted as go-betweens. The author sets the stage for the tumult by casting the Donegal town of Gweedore as a microcosm of an Ireland in which, decades after the Great Famine, horrific poverty still prompted desperate responses to the barbarous evictions and other abuses of “ ‘landlordism,’ an entirely pejorative word implying abuse of authority, from rack-renting to mercilessly arbitrary evictions.” To depict broader crises, Kavanagh uses “the shifting episodic structure of today’s television dramas,” or quick cuts from country to country and character to character, which makes it hard to follow the sprawling plot and cast. Yet Kavanagh’s keen sense of Ireland’s pain—and the damage England inflicted on itself with its handling of it—ultimately justifies her conclusion, which approvingly quotes Roy Jenkins’ Gladstone: “What vast benefit would have followed from an Irish settlement in the 1880s, thirty years before the Easter Rising.”
A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland’s fraught quest for independence.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4936-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An acerbic period sketch and a readable tale of pure Gothic horror straight from the heartland of America.
The ghoulish saga of Dr. H.H. Holmes, the dapper devil who established himself as America's first serial killer 100 years ago.
Schechter (American Literature and Culture/Queens College, CUNY; Deranged) offers a disjointed opening before settling into his tale. He begins with a dramatic depiction of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. He then writes of a New Hampshire boy named Herman who is 11 years in 1871; Herman has a penchant for skinning and deboning live animals. The next time we see him, it is under the alias of Dr. H.H. Holmes, venturing into the Chicago suburb of Englewood to weasel a profitable drugstore from its dying patron and his overworked wife. Holmes then constructs a three-story castle containing such delights as a greased shaft that ends in a dark cellar filled with vats of chemical corrosives; this labyrinthine chamber of horrors becomes one of his murder devices. Under investigation by the government for financial irregularities, Holmes sets fire to the castle, flees Chicago, and launches a series of insurance scams. He murders his oafish assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and forces one of Pitezel's four threadbare children to identify her father's decayed body so that he can collect a $10,000 life insurance policy. Eventually Holmes is discovered and several decomposed bodies are exhumed from under the remains of the castle. In custody, Holmes confesses bluntly, "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.'' With a total of 27 victims, Holmes was tried (the case became a public sensation). After his conviction for Pitezel's murder, Holmes confessed to 26 other killings—some for insurance money, some out of sexual jealousy, others for fear the victims would give him away. Rather than psychoanalyzing his psychotic subject, Schechter sticks firmly to the gory narrative of his crimes, in which the description of the murderous castle stands as a spectacular centerpiece.
An acerbic period sketch and a readable tale of pure Gothic horror straight from the heartland of America.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-73216-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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