As president of an institute devoted to promoting women’s military studies, De Pauw (History/George Washington Univ.) is clearly enthralled with women’s place in military history. Unfortunately, very little of that enthusiasm comes across in this dry-as-toast account. De Pauw notes that her book is likely to be controversial because it operates from the premise that while women have always been involved in war, this involvement has largely remained hidden—due, she says, to society’s inability to accept the fact that women can be simultaneously nurturing and aggressive. De Pauw comments in her own preface that an early reader of her work remarked, “There is something here to offend everyone.” Maybe so; but her research, while exhaustive, doesn’t really live up to expectations. She begins with a chapter of definitions and presuppositions that includes a subsection entitled, “What Is a Woman?” (And we duly learn, “A woman is any human who self-identifies as female, whatever her race, class, behavior, or physical appearance.”) Another chapter defines war as “a disciplined and socially sanctioned use of deadly force by one group of people against another.” (How else could it be defined?) De Pauw traces the history of war, beginning before Christ and ending with contemporary times, noting various women’s actions and how they changed as female societal roles evolved. Readers interested in some of the intriguing and lesser-known women unearthed by De Pauw—’say, the British queen Boudicca, who led a revolt against the Romans in 61 a.d. or Hannah Duston, who fought the Indians in America in 1697”—will be frustrated by the author’s decision to compress so much history into one volume. Still, as an overview of war’s evolution and women’s share in it, it—ll suffice. (24 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8061-3100-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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