The ideal companion for an idle hour, like one spent in an airport bar.
A popular history of getting soused.
Language historian Forsyth (The Elements of Eloquence, 2014, etc.) assembles a brisk, witty, and roughly chronological précis on drinking cultures and practices around the world since the earliest fizzle of fermentation. Using humor to skim over the violence and sadness of alcohol abuse, the author specializes in snappy summaries and choice anecdotes about the weird and obsessive customs that people have created around the process of getting drunk, with more snark reserved for the teetotalers than the tipplers. Take the ancient Egyptians, who felt it their holy duty to imbibe and cavort to excess, one of many cultures that used alcohol as a means to spiritual elevation. While his coverage can be glib and occasionally unbalanced—he waxes on about Shakespeare's relationship to wine but distills millennia of Middle Eastern intoxication into the quip that, “For a Muslim, drinking is rarely simple”—Forsyth’s rollicking sketches belie the extensive research that informs them. He offers a solidly embedded history, zooming in on the spaces and objects that have enabled and embodied inebriation across the ages. As with his work in etymology, this book showcases Forsyth’s ability to make sense of the court records, wine songs, and snatches of poetry he finds in the textual slag heap. Not surprisingly, much of the story is bound up in religion and the law, and he leverages the anthropological distinction between “wet” and “dry" societies to explain, among other things, the close relationship between prohibitive legislation and widespread drunkenness. Forsyth's account is as ribald and casual as that of a teenage tour guide working for tips, but it’s full of good history and good humor. This smart and satisfying generalist history will make you wish the author would sum up every other subject while you bob along the waves of his irreverent, learned wit (preferably with a drink in hand).
The ideal companion for an idle hour, like one spent in an airport bar.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57537-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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