A beautiful story about beautiful things from someone who knows everything there is to know about the field.
An acclaimed expert provides a striking account of watches, their history, and their social impact.
“Watches not only measure time, they are a manifestation of time—signifiers of the most precious thing we have,” writes Struthers. The first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology, the study of time and timepieces, the author has devoted her life to them. Her debut book is a fascinating, charming examination, and Struthers ably melds the larger story with her own. She initially trained as a jeweler and silversmith, and before that, she was intrigued by forensics. All these came together when she encountered watchmaking, and she fell in love with the complexity and precision of the discipline. She takes a tour through the evolution of watches, noting that the first were produced in the early 16th century. Some watches constructed hundreds of years ago still work perfectly, with little maintenance; few machines can make comparable claims. The book has plenty of stories and colorful characters, making for a remarkable narrative. For a while, it looked as if mechanical watches would become extinct under pressure from digital technology, but the past decade has seen a new generation emerge as high-prestige items, and most of them are superb objects. Struthers provides a glossary as well as an appendix on how to repair a watch, and her expertise and passion for her subject shine through. She has always been aware of the passage of time, but it became an acute concern when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The prognosis is good, but it gave her a fresh perspective on her work. “We all measure our lives in moments of time, and the memories that accompany them,” she writes. “Watches, which tell the time for us as they did for those before us, provide a constant in those memories.”
A beautiful story about beautiful things from someone who knows everything there is to know about the field.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780063048706
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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