A solid contribution to the history of technology and commerce, with broad implications for the present.
Mr. Owen, meet Mr. Colt: a wide-ranging if overlong history of the role of arms manufacturing in the Industrial Revolution.
The rise of mechanized industry in Britain, writes Satia (History/Stanford Univ.; Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East, 2009), corresponded to a period of “more or less constant war.” There was always France to fight, of course, but also the rebellious American Colonies and uprisings elsewhere in the empire, and the Dutch and the Spanish. An economy flourished, therefore, in the manufacture and sale of armaments and other military provisions. One of Satia’s perhaps unlikely case studies is Samuel Galton, a nominally good Quaker who managed to reconcile that belief system with making a fortune in weaponry. Then as now, the arms merchants were not especially particular about where their products wound up. As Satia observes, in the 18th century alone, millions of guns sprang forth from workshops and factories in the Midlands and London, winding up in the hands of buyers everywhere in the world; in 1715, “the government discovered that London gunsmiths were making 15,500 guns,” with some 4,000 of them “for Service not Known,” as a contemporary document put it. A century later, and more than 151,000 British guns were bound for India, Indonesia, and China. This early military-industrial complex also valued interchangeability, standardization, and mass production, which would come to define the manufacture of nearly everything else. While standardization was not commonplace until after the Crimean War, it was at a premium well before. After 1815, Satia writes, the gun business faded somewhat as slavery wound down, for the slave trade was bound up part and parcel in armaments. She closes with a sharp look at today’s mass shootings, which she considers “historically specific”—i.e., the product of a time in which guns are used for private grievances more than empire-building.
A solid contribution to the history of technology and commerce, with broad implications for the present.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2186-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
HISTORY | BUSINESS | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL BUSINESS | GENERAL HISTORY
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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