The record of a man’s pleasure in discovering, for himself, the life of a faith healer.
Professional monologist-amateur historian Pitt recounts his search for a 17th-century healer.
Scion of Irish gentry, Valentine Greatrakes (1628–83) had an “impulse” one day. He felt, like many after him, that he could effect cures by the laying on of his hands. His good wife told him, plainly, that he was a fool. “He was not quite sure of this,” noted Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1848), “notwithstanding the high authority from which it came . . .” But he persevered. In his day, the healer attained much fame as he treated, first, the King’s Evil, then ague, next pain, gout, most obstructions and, finally, everything. The Church charged him with practicing without a license and, worse, exacting no fees. After service in Cromwell’s army, through the Interregnum and even during the Restoration, he dispensed treatment similar to the supposedly exclusive, politically valuable King’s Touch. He received humble sufferers at his chambers and made calls to noble houses, chasing pains and squeezing out aches with varying success. Celebrated as a natural healer, his efforts were endorsed by pioneer chemist Robert Boyle. When author Pitt read a six-word footnote about Greatrakes, the game was afoot, the author’s endorphins activated by a search, eventually rewarded, for a text by the analgesic Irishman himself. He and friend Iain traveled from San Francisco to Ireland on the spoor of The Famous Irish Stroker. They conferred with picaresque rustics, frequented antiquarian bookshops and engaged an Arkansan dowser in their research. Pitt’s text is as much about the fun of recreational historical pursuit as it is about the master healer. It’s still unclear whether Greatrakes was a natural phenomenon or simply a charlatan, as asserted by debunker Mackay (whom the author seems to have overlooked). Like Boyle, Pitt leans toward faith—illumination, not illusion.
The record of a man’s pleasure in discovering, for himself, the life of a faith healer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59376-126-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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