A strikingly rendered portrait of the era’s fervent belief in progress.
A thematically driven history of a vastly changing Paris from the 1870s to World War I.
The term Belle Époque was applied later to this period, as a nostalgic celebration of the Eiffel Tower, Beaux Arts, and the can-can, yet in reality it was a time of massively disruptive advances in building, technology, equality, social justice, politics, and economics. Rapport, a professor of history at the University of Glasgow and author of 1848: Year of Revolution and The Unruly City, focuses primarily on two dominating currents—radical politics and the concept of modernity—throughout this authoritative work. The author begins with the tension involved in the construction of the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur, symbol of reactionary French Catholicism, and the Eiffel Tower, centerpiece for the Universal Exposition of 1889—both of which were the result of significant technological progress. That progress also brought electricity (Paris became “the city of light”) as well as industrial displacement, already underway with the other construction projects of Baron Georges Haussmann. As Rapport points out, the resultant squeezing of the poor in Montmartre was poignantly portrayed in the “naturalism” of novelist Emile Zola. Other themes Rapport tackles are the growth of consumerism; the codification of literacy; the abolition of censorship, thus feeding a huge newspaper industry; and the rise of feminism, which the author illustrates through the work of author Marguerite Durand, publisher of La Fronde. The author also looks at the social pressure from both right and left to address the deepening sense of social injustice and inequalities in the form of violent anarchism and syndicalism, and he devotes several chapters to the Dreyfus Affair—especially the role of the media in airing the truth (Emile Zola’s “J’accuse”) and spurring proliferation of what might be called “alternate facts.”
A strikingly rendered portrait of the era’s fervent belief in progress.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781541647497
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
HISTORY | ART & PHOTOGRAPHY | MODERN | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
