From the editor of a volume of essays about gender and the world wars (Behind the Lines, 1987) comes an anthology of writings by women during WWI. Starting from the now unstartling observation that women’s experiences challenge the equation of war with masculinity, Higonnet tries to get at such home-front issues as food shortages and inflation. The text of Rep. Jeanette Rankin’s April 6, 1917, vote opposing America’s entry to the war is juxtaposed with the battle oath of Ecatarina (Catalina) Theodoroiu, the first woman in the Romanian army. The collection also features short stories and poetry. Highlights include poems by Anna Akhmatova and an unforgettable short story (—Writing a War Story—) by Edith Wharton, who was based in Paris doing relief work during the war. Most arresting is a poem by an anonymous Irish woman speculating about whether her husband is still alive (—My husband’s in Salonika,/I wonder if he’s dead./I wonder if he knows he has/a kid with a foxy head—) and berating the government, those who did not go off to war, and the men who rape Irish women and leave them pregnant: “They takes us out to the Blarney,/they lays us in the grass,/they puts us in the family way/and leaves us on our ass.” The book focuses on form as much as content: Higonnet argues that just as war changed women’s lives, it also changed their writing. Some women continued to write in traditional forms, but wrote about new wartime themes, thus “achiev[ing] the shock of innovation. . . . Others experimented with modern and modernist techniques.” Lines of Fire’s greatest strength is its truly international flavor. Higonnet balances German, French, and British contributors with voices from India, Lebanon, and Syria. A rich collection, less uneven than such anthologies tend to be—even though it would be more ideologically balanced if Higonnet had included more pieces of pro-war propaganda. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-452-28146-6
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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