A superb local history—but in Northern Ireland, local history is of international importance.
Elliott (Irish Studies/Liverpool Univ.) offers a scholarly history of Ulster Catholics, which by definition is a history of Ulster Protestants as well.
Ulster is composed of nine counties, six of them in Northern Ireland, the other three part of the Republic of Ireland. Unlike the Republic, which is around 95 percent Catholic, Northern Ireland is about two-thirds Protestant and largely of Scottish or English (rather than Irish) ancestry. Quite logically, they are pro-Union (wishing to stay united with England). The Catholic minority in Ulster, with equal logic, resents British rule and for many years refused to participate in Northern Ireland’s government, thus ensuring that a pattern of disenfranchisement and discrimination was carried out against them. To understand how this complicated business came to be, Elliott travels back to St. Patrick and his conversion of the island to Christianity, then describes a series of English invasions (making use of Scottish mercenaries) that ensued down the years. She discusses the peculiar development of Irish Catholicism, always a bit too far away for Roman dominance. Then it’s on to Scottish—and thus Protestant—domination of Ulster; early nationalism among Ulstermen (who held “Irish” and “Catholic” to be synonymous terms); the penal laws of the 18th century (which further dispossessed Ulster Catholics and established their curse of poverty); the political emergence of Catholics in the 19th century; and the 20th-century events that led to the present “troubles.” Elliott, an Ulster Catholic, treats all parties fairly, but she has a special insight into the discrimination (mainly in schooling and housing) that Ulster Catholics endure, and into the thousand (almost subliminal) codes that people who are in most respects identical invoke to keep themselves separate.
A superb local history—but in Northern Ireland, local history is of international importance.Pub Date: March 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-465-01903-X
Page Count: 599
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 Yorker staff 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
