A book to be absorbed, marveled at and admired for the wide range of research linking events and thoughts.
Blom (A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, 2010, etc.) undertakes a massive work explaining the changes that took place in the years between the world wars.
The author explains how World War I didn’t really end; it was halted by mutual exhaustion, with one side economically weaker, only to be picked up again 30 years later. Blom extends his work regarding the prewar years as he chronicles the world’s disastrous move toward modernity. In the years 1914 to 1918, machines began to truly overpower humans, killing first the elite and then the workingmen, leaving a generation changed forever. Some readers may find it difficult to follow the myriad threads the author strings together, but most will admire his ability to compare and contrast such events as the industrial revolution in Russia and the 1929 stock market crash. The 1920s saw the rise of the automotive industry, the consumer economy and even advertising. It was a time when the new fashions of Coco Chanel reflected the physical and sexual freedoms of the flappers, but it was not to last. The lower classes no longer demeaned themselves serving the rich; they looked for less-restrictive, better-paying jobs in the new technologies. The market crash collapsed what little economic recovery had occurred, and Prohibition and immigration laws illuminated the American culture wars. Modernity continued to upset social structures, moral norms and long-held traditions. Optimism was replaced by pessimism; art and science polarized communities; and cultural propaganda and oppression were rampant. The inexorable rise of Nazism and Fascism offered a Messianic sense of something greater than the individual.
A book to be absorbed, marveled at and admired for the wide range of research linking events and thoughts.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02249-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | WORLD
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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