Championing the magical and mythical dimensions of Old Irish.
How the real world is deciphered by Irish myth.
This book by author and broadcaster Magan (1970-2025) explores “the enchantment, sublime beauty, and sheer oddness” of a three-millennia old, profoundly ecological, proto-Indo-European language (An Ghaeilge, or Gaelic) that honors the natural world and celebrates an age-old way of life. Sharing a kinship with Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks in its fascination with the origins of place names, the book will be catnip to any linguist or philologist, a rich, compelling, and often fanciful immersion in language that reflects openness, imagination, and considerable scholarship. Magan mounts a passionate defense of Old Irish, yet another traditional language and way of grasping reality being eroded by modernity. Between 50% and 90% of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by the end of the century, according to recent research, with Irish no less vulnerable. As Magan writes, “Neuroscience tells us that a language can’t change our reality, but it also suggests that different languages allow us to see things in different ways and to focus on different things. It offers proof of the intuitive sense we always had that each language opens a unique window on the world”—windows that could close forever. Yet for all its merits, and they are legion, Magan’s book may be a murky brew for the layperson. Its torrent of obscure, unpronounceable words and the multiplicity of their meanings and interpretations may begin to grow dizzying. Although Magan uses science to defend some of his more grounded assertions, one may question his belief that modern humanity is too fixated on rationality, and that the mythological worldview offers a deeper glimpse of “reality.”
Championing the magical and mythical dimensions of Old Irish.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781645023760
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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