An engaging history of social transformation.
British social historian Goodman, whose previous books brought Tudor and Victorian societies to life, now turns to the advent of coal use.
Beginning in the 1500s, the increasing use of coal transformed heating, cooking, architecture, road-building, and, not least, London’s air. Although coal was adopted early by lime burners (who produced mortar for building) and blacksmiths, the greatest use was in homes. “The early rise of coal,” writes the author, “is not a story about industry; it is a tale of domestic needs and comforts, of individual, private choices.” After a brisk overview of other forms of fuel—wood, peat, dung—Goodman offers a detailed, abundantly illustrated picture of the ways coal changed daily life for all classes throughout Great Britain, drawing from a prodigious number of sources, including property inventories, house expenditures, town records, housekeeping manuals, and recipe books. In addition, she recounts her own experiences in facsimile houses, cooking and heating with different kinds of fuel and confronting the “nonstop cleaning” of the filth resulting from burning coal. “Coal meant more smoke within the living area,” she notes, “and it meant smoke that stung the eyes and affected breathing.” Nevertheless, coal became increasingly popular because it burned with a “small and uniform” flame and was plentiful, leaving more land for agriculture. Within a few decades, houses had chimneys, kitchens had grates, and cooks had new recipes. The “cuisine of coal” included “boiled or steamed puddings both sweet and savoury, roast meats which are in fact baked meats served with ‘roast’ potatoes and all the trimmings, Victoria sponge cakes and hot buttered toast with jam.” For several centuries, coal served as the predominant fuel for homes and industry. While in continental Europe and the U.S., “domestic coal-burning barely lasted a century,” Londoners “cooked on coal for over 350 years.”
An engaging history of social transformation.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-763-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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