A tremendous sensation when it was published in Britain, this is an intriguing study that will naturally arouse a good deal...
A British social critic weighs in on the decline of British culture.
Hitchens maintains that the UK’s loss of international stature during the last half of the 20th century can be traced directly to the failure of the Conservative Party to adequately represent the views of its constituents, and he sets out to prove this thesis through a series of historical anecdotes. His analysis is framed by the funerals of two “larger-than-life” Britons—Sir Winston Churchill and Princess Diana, whose comparative gravitas provides a vivid example of precisely that decline of national seriousness that the author has in mind. The rise of Tony Blair’s current Labor government (as the result of a “slow motion coup d’etat”) is seen as the final step in Britain’s retreat from the world stage—an insurrection that Hitchens derides as the destruction of all that is unique and good about the United Kingdom in preparation for its future as little more than a quaint island province of a German-dominated European superstate. This is another variation, of course, on a very old theme: times have changed. Long-held beliefs, values, moralities, and traditions have all been devalued in a startlingly short time and without the external shock that normally signals such a sea change. Such perennial nostalgic fear of the unfamiliar is compounded in Britain today by two undeniably seminal events: the inexorable dissolution (or “devolution”) of the UK, combined with its equally inevitable absorption into the European federation. The Empire unraveled a long time ago; now, it appears that there may not “always be an England” after all.
A tremendous sensation when it was published in Britain, this is an intriguing study that will naturally arouse a good deal less passion on these shores.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-893554-18-X
Page Count: 332
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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
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