Old news in stale language—not a happy combination.
Powerful people have done—and will probably always do—bad things to accumulate more power and riches and opportunities for sex: that’s the not-very-startling thesis of this bite-sized history of the world.
After declaring that history is fun, former Canadian public official, journalist, and academic Gigantès proceeds to prove the opposite as he writes dreary section after dreary section, beginning with Moses and ending with the ongoing “Irish problem.” In what might better have been subtitled World History for Dummies, Gigantès assumes his readers know nothing. He tells us that Jesus was born about 2,000 years ago, that Nero and Caligula were not Boy Scouts, that the historical Richard III does not much resemble Shakespeare’s villain, that Cortés and Pizarro killed lots of innocent people, that the US has not solved its social problems, that Hitler “will be remembered as a monster,” that Communism didn’t work. Worse, he seems unable to find a fresh phrase anywhere. We read of craws with things stuck in them, of nuggets of wisdom, of ticking bombs. Gigantès does try to come up with a catchphrase: “grand acquisator.” He acknowledges that “acquisator” is not really a word, but he likes it, so he uses it throughout to describe the most rapacious of human beings. Among them are Napoleon and Hitler—both of whom, he reveals, launched disastrous invasions of Russia. He also tweaks his American neighbors to the south, reminding us that for all our posturing about human rights, we still have corrosive civil-rights problems of our own, especially with Native Americans and African-Americans. And he believes, as expressed in yet another hackneyed phrase, that the “one faint beacon of hope” for the future is . . . the European Community, which has, he announces, decided that cooperation is better than world war.
Old news in stale language—not a happy combination.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1077-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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