A welcome reevaluation of an underappreciated author.
British biographer Watson (The Crossing, 2001) paints a sympathetic and revealing portrait of Charles Lamb’s older sister Mary (1764–1847), one of the most important female writers of the Regency period.
John Lamb was a waiter at the Inner Temple, home of London’s elite barristers. Given educations suitable to their stations, his children lived comfortably until the death of their father’s patron forced a move to shabbier quarters, where the family became dependent on the children’s earnings. Mary, trained as a seamstress, had the added burden of caring for their sickly mother, whom she stabbed to death with a kitchen knife on September 22, 1796. Charles took the weapon from Mary’s hand and led her away to an insane asylum. Courts determined that she was not responsible for her actions and, after her illness abated, released her to Charles’s custody. For the rest of her life, Mary suffered periods of institutionalization when her illness (probably bipolar disorder) reached periodic crises. In between episodes, she and Charles carried on a curious existence, in which his earnings as a clerk at East India House supported a bohemian lifestyle in the company of some of the best-known writers and intellectuals of the era. Wordsworth and Coleridge were lifelong friends of the Lambs; Southey, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and William Godwin regularly attended their Thursday evening affairs. Godwin published their masterpiece, Tales from Shakespeare, for which Mary did the bulk of the work. Watson keeps the focus on Mary, detailing her friendship with Sarah Stoddart, who married Hazlitt, and her correspondence with Dorothy Wordsworth and other literary women of the age. Sadly, Mary’s disease continued to plague her, taking as much as three months from every year. Her writing career ended in 1815, but Mary outlived her brother by more than a decade.
A welcome reevaluation of an underappreciated author.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58542-356-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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