Next book

OSCAR WILDE'S LAST STAND

DECADENCE, CONSPIRACY, AND THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS TRIAL OF THE CENTURY

Even in death Oscar Wilde could still provoke upright society, as this lively and revealing history of a bizarre 1918 libel trial in London, concerning a play by Wilde, demonstrates. Focusing on the scandal surrounding the first British performance of Wilde’s last play, SalomÇ, Hoare, the biographer of Stephen Tennant (1991) and Noâl Coward (1996), wonders what Wilde would have made of the early 20th century. A byword for unnameable perversity to the Edwardian middle class, Wilde had become a martyr figure for the decadent underground, which continued with desperate hedonism during WW I. The headline-making trial that SalomÇ touched off suggests that, even in 1918, public opinion would still not have been friendly to Wilde. Noel Pembleton Billing, the right-wing publisher of the yellow journals the Imperialist and the Vigilante, and a loose-cannon member of Parliament, needed to maintain his maverick political career, even through proto-McCarthyite tactics. He had already claimed that the Germans had a list of 47,000 high-ranking members of the government, the military, the aristocracy, and society (all of them secret homosexuals) who were being blackmailed into sabotaging the war effort. Why not suggest that a new production of SalomÇ, starring the scantily clad dancer Maud Allan, was a Hunnish effort to undermine public morality? When he ran a ferocious attack on the play headlined “The Cult of the Clitoris” (not a term many readers knew), the producers took legal action. The ensuing circus of a court case, with Billing conducting his own manic defense, dug up Wilde for public obloquy again, this time with Lord Alfred Douglas leading the attack on his former lover. It also revealed that mainstream attitudes toward homosexuality, morality, and aestheticism had changed little since Wilde’s death in 1900. Expanding an unlikely historical footnote, this account of Wilde’s posthumous last trial and its wider significance is sensational in more than just the journalistic sense of the word. (For more Wilde-iana, see Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album, p. 259.) (24 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: April 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-55970-423-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Next book

IN COLD BLOOD

"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965

ISBN: 0375507906

Page Count: 343

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965

Categories:
Close Quickview