Usually funny, rarely fatuous—all in a layer of irony thick enough to insulate an iceberg.
Snarky commentary on the disappearance of what used to be familiar in nature (the dodo), in the neighborhood (the “proper bank”) and in the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror (Brylcreem).
Bywater writes columns on such subjects for the British Independent on Sunday and, presumably, has assembled a selection here. But this is no standard anthology of a journalist’s pieces. Bywater has arranged his alphabetically (“Moon, World War II Bomber Found On,” etc.) and added some accoutrements of scholarship (footnotes, bibliography, index), most of which are playful. His index may be the most amusing of all in its literary history, and it merits reading as a comic set-piece (“jokes, lost, where do they go?”). Readers on the other side of The Pond may understand more readily than readers here many of the entries, such as the riffs on “poofs” (British slang for an effeminate man) and on the evanescent noun of address “old chap.” And readers here will either smile or wince at Bywater’s patent dislike of current President Bush and his policies. Under the listing for “Democracy,” for example, is a wry footnote about the prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq. Other readers may object to the author’s flippant treatment of organized (and disorganized) religion. These caveats and cavils aside, it’s all very funny, very piercing and even very learned. He exposes the obsessive absurdities of Boy Scouts’ father Robert Baden-Powell; offers an amusing list of 1970s sillinesses; bemoans the loss of adult authority and gravitas (in parents, in schoolteachers); misses the cries of street vendors; blasts Disney and Microsoft; notes the passing of the unique smell of Paris and the fog of London; wonders what’s happened to Ronco gadgets and Jantzen swimsuits. And, over and over, he cracks wise, sometimes to hilarious effect. Today, he says, in our save-the-whales milieu, Moby-Dick could not be written. “[It] would,” he says, “be a novel about tofu.”
Usually funny, rarely fatuous—all in a layer of irony thick enough to insulate an iceberg.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-86207-701-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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