Exemplary historical writing, to be read alongside Fischer, with Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics,...
An ambitious, fittingly sized effort to distill the complex, contentious relations between Mother England and her unruly offspring in the New World.
A native Californian who has long lived in England, Burk (Modern and Contemporary History/University College London; Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor, 2001, etc.) is particularly well placed to document that relationship, which has ranged from enmity to mutual distrust to close friendship over the past 500 years. There is plenty deeply buried in British history that explains why things are the way they are in America—for instance, the old law of primogeniture, by which the eldest son inherited the estate and his siblings got nothing, and for which reason “nearly all of Virginia’s ruling families were founded by younger sons of eminent English families,” men forced to go abroad to seek their fortunes. Much of this deep history is explored by David Hackett Fischer in his now-standard Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), which helps us understand, for instance, why so many Americans are grimly bent on religious fundamentalism (blame it on the Puritans). Burk adds materially to Fischer’s kindred work by extending her discussion a couple of hundred years to the present and pointing out the cultural gap between the two nations that has grown since, a “huge and insuperable barrier” that GIs and British civilians faced too often during the war years. Strained by imperial edicts and colonial resentments, Anglo-American relations have lately been buffeted by a shift in power relations, as the British Empire disintegrated and cowboy politics dominated; Tony Blair and now Gordon Brown have learned that, perhaps to their dismay. Now that the American Empire appears to be disintegrating, too, that asymmetrical relationship may shift—in which case a new chapter will need to be added to this long but always swiftly moving narrative.
Exemplary historical writing, to be read alongside Fischer, with Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (1998) thrown in for good measure.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-971-9
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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