A solid if incomplete contribution to a currently hot debate.
A closely argued brief for free speech.
Heins’s case relies on precedent and law, but her arguments take place in a sealed intellectual chamber isolated from the real and messy world. She begins with Plato, who, concerned that exposure to erotic literature would lead the young to immoral behavior, counseled censorship. She then compares him to Aristotle, who argued that viewing violent and graphic scenes provided a necessary catharsis. The tension between these two approaches informs the argument to this day, but now the situation is exacerbated by children’s exposure to the Internet and television. Arguing that it was only in the 17th century that Western society began to show much apparent concern about the moral health of the young, the author attempts to trace the change in attitudes towards adolescent vice (beginning with masturbation, which became a 19th-century obsession). She describes how the classics, including Shakespeare, were bowdlerized; how Andrew Comstock got Congress to pass a seminal obscenity law in 1873; the banning of Joyce’s Ulysses; and the paradoxical move away from censorship in the 1950s (when the Kinsey Report was published and hitherto taboo subjects became more freely discussed). By the 1980s the tension between advocates of free speech and those concerned with protecting youth led to greater calls for censorship, calls that increased in the 1990s with demands for V-chips and filters. Heins argues that there are no conclusive studies proving that access to sexual and violent material is harmful, but she fails to address the understandable concerns of contemporary parents who must raise children in a world where graphic sexual and violent images are readily accessible.
A solid if incomplete contribution to a currently hot debate.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-17545-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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