Thoughtful and well-researched, but nonscholars would be satisfied with an essay-length treatment of this esoteric moment in...
A journey into the peculiar, nearly lawless world of bookselling in France circa 1778.
Darnton, a longtime scholar of French culture and trenchant commentator on books and publishing (Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature, 2014, etc.), has spent decades poring through the files of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, a Swiss publishing house. Little distinguished STN from its competitors just before the French Revolution, which serves the author’s purposes well: his goal is to explore how books were generally distributed and sold and which books were most commonly consumed (mostly Enlightenment writers like Rousseau, religious works, pornography, and scurrilous titles about royalty and religions). The available evidence is mainly in ledgers and stiff business correspondence, but Darnton finds an arc by following Jean-François Favarger, an STN sales representative who, in 1778, circled the country visiting booksellers. Boots on the ground were essential because the book trade of the time was almost unmanageably chaotic. Publishers freely pirated each other’s works (part of Favarger’s job was to suss out what was worth pirating); books were shipped unbound, prone to the ravages of weather and transit; border smuggling was rampant to avoid the monarchy’s control of the trade; and booksellers could often be lax about payment. (While on the road, Favarger maintained rankings of booksellers’ reliability.) “We don’t know of any branch of commerce that is more disagreeable or unrewarding than the book trade,” one bookseller grumbled. Darnton’s enthusiasm for his subject is palpable, and he delivers bucolic descriptions (with contemporary illustrations) of Favarger’s stops in places like Lyon, Bordeaux, and Dijon. But at heart this is an academic, largely dry business history. Favarger is an intrepid salesman, but his greatest drama involves replacing a horse.
Thoughtful and well-researched, but nonscholars would be satisfied with an essay-length treatment of this esoteric moment in publishing history.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-514451-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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