A fresh, invigorating history of philosophical and political struggles.
A vibrant history of the reception of Charles Darwin’s ideas by American minds and spirits.
With the theory of evolution still generating controversy, Fuller (English/Univ. of Tulsa; From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, 2011, etc.), a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, focuses on the immediate response to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by a handful of prominent American thinkers: Harvard botanist Asa Gray, first to read the book; his intellectual adversary Louis Agassiz; transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau; ardent abolitionist and educator Franklin Sanborn; Bronson Alcott, “the most radical idealist in America”; and Charles Loring Brace, a social reformer who shared his cousin Gray’s copy with his New England friends. Drawing on his protagonists’ public and private writings and letters, steeped in mid-19th-century culture, Fuller creates a rich tapestry of personalities and roiling ideas. In radiant prose, and with a sure eye for the telling detail, the author reveals the shattering impact of Darwin’s book on religious thought, scientific inquiry, and especially on debates over slavery and, indeed, on the status of blacks on the evolutionary scale from beast to man. Even those who did not read the book itself, though it was easily available, had access to its ideas from reviews in important magazines, many of which “focused on the work’s ethnological implications” to racial theories or criticized Darwin for undermining religion. Gray, who championed Darwin’s ideas, tried mightily to reconcile them with his own theological convictions. Could natural selection “explain all of nature’s marvels?” he asked. Surely it would take some omnipotent designer to create the human eye. Fuller asserts that “every nuance and involution in the book” refocused Thoreau’s investigations into nature, and he shows how both pro-slavery advocates and abolitionists used Darwin’s theories to defend their positions. Lincoln was vilified in pro-slavery cartoons, portrayed as a gorilla or “the missing link between blacks and whites.”
A fresh, invigorating history of philosophical and political struggles.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-42833-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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