Over the intense research and archival riches of what was a clever dissertation, Kete (History/Trinity College) raises some lofty theories about modernism, culture, gender, and class that displace and obscure an inherently interesting social history of pets, especially dogs, among 19th-century middle-class Parisians. In spite of the cozy title, Kete's concern is with ``paradigms,'' ``hegemonies,'' ``counter-icons,'' and ``constructions.'' After considering the way humans treat dogs—their abuse by the working class and by scientists, their need for protection in refuges created by women and in pounds invented by men—Kete explains their identification with fidelity as a substitute for human infidelity and their reputed heroism as a comment on the unheroic in 19th-century society. A chapter follows on the taxing of dogs and their classification into luxuries or working beasts, and then another on aquariums and dog-breeding, the controlled, ``denatured'' world of pets, the domestic panorama, the ``corrigible universes of little worlds'' they inhabited. The theme of interiorization, of domesticity, continues with a chapter on dog-care books, discipline, hygiene, and control followed by a chapter on rabies, a disease believed in the 19th century to be caused by sexual frustration in overdomesticated animals and thought to produce sexual excess in the human beings they infected. There is a final chapter on cats, the anti-pets, their reputation for sexuality, perfidy, and manipulation, and their association with marginal human types such as intellectuals. During this period the cat was ``rehabilitated'' to display loyalty. In the tradition of Foucault, Kete uses ordinary, obscure, and private experience to illuminate the public and official world. Ironically, her philosophical jargon excludes the very people and class she is studying. Insightful, though selective and structurally fragmented, the technique overwhelms the subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-07101-8
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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