A well-researched, detailed tome probably best consumed at the rate of one chapter per day.
Geiger (Higher Education/Penn State Univ.; Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth, 2007, etc.) offers an encyclopedic history of American colleges and universities, ending as the United States entered World War II.
Although anecdotes and brief case studies punctuate this thick book, Geiger goes broad rather than deep. The twelve chapters unfold mostly chronologically, starting with the opening of Harvard College in 1636 (other sections include “Colonial Colleges, 1740-1780,” “The Low State of the Colleges, 1800-1820,” “Land Grant Colleges and the Practical Arts” and so on). For about 250 years, the saga features almost exclusively white males from well-to-do families. Women barely figure in the chronology until Page 400, at which point Geiger treats their plight, and eventual advancement, in a fascinating but frustratingly brief section. Racial and ethnic minorities are almost entirely absent. The lack of such narratives aside, Geiger ably parses the influences of general society on institutions of higher learning and vice versa. Colleges in what became the United States began in the Colonial era, influenced by Great Britain, mostly isolated in rural areas and sending students into a pre-industrial economy. Geiger demonstrates the shift in curricula to help serve an increasingly urbanized nation with a more industrialized economy. All that might sound inevitable—even obvious—but the author shows that the inevitable did not unfold without effort. He is especially eager to explain the development of a "college culture," the pressures that led to somewhat democratizing land-grant campuses and emergence of universities devoted to applied and theoretical research. The rise of schools within campuses to train physicians, lawyers and ministers is an additional thread that Geiger integrates into the bigger picture.
A well-researched, detailed tome probably best consumed at the rate of one chapter per day.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0691149394
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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