The concluding volume of Stone's excellent trilogy on marriage in early modern England (Uncertain Unions, 1992; Road to Divorce, 1990). Starting with a summary of the legal background—the laws and rituals governing divorce when it required an act of Parliament- -Stone introduces two aspects of English life that figure prominently in the cases that follow: the role of servants in family life, and the absence of privacy. Although the substance of the cases is essentially lurid—tales of infidelity, betrayal, retribution, abuse, and humiliation—Stone's style is technical and scholarly, true to its sources in the detailed documentation that the divorces of the rich produced, revealing the lives of prominent but not famous people who otherwise hold no place in history. The cases demonstrate the shifts in society from status to contract, from religious to secular understanding, as well as the shift in power from men (who in the early years held women and their children as property) to women. They demonstrate the increased demands that both men and women made on marriage, transforming it from a merely economic arrangement to a source of pleasure, recreation, and companionship, especially in the large country houses where infidelity seemed as inevitable as boredom. One woman sued her husband for impotence, and Stone reveals the various ways that men were required to demonstrate their virility in public. Among the author's many insights is his noting of romantic fiction's disruptive role in family life, implying that, in some hands, literacy and access to popular romance were dangerous. A fascinating and factual introduction to the history of domestic life. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-19-820254-7
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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