Historical writing of the first rank, graphic and of real presence.
Rees debuts with a cracking tale drawn from an unedifying episode in her native England’s history: the “Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas” of hundreds of British women, shipped on the Lady Julian in 1789 to penal life in Australia.
The author expertly paints a portrait of London in the late 1780s, a grim time when thousands of soldiers returning from the war in the American colonies displaced women from employment. Having no place to go, many became “disorderly girls”: prostitutes, shoplifters, pickpockets, thieves, muggers, and forgers. Of the many caught and sentenced, a good number were burned at the stake, the rest tossed into jail. But the jails became overcrowded, and authorities decided the solution was “transportation,” the new fad of shipping convicts off to Australia. Rees follows the more than 200 women who were sent to Sydney Cove aboard the Lady Julian as closely as records allow, from the street to jail to the Old Bailey to ship to colony. Readers will be transported by the author’s prose, a lively and atmospheric brew of great immediacy detailing the circumstances of poor women in London, conditions in jail, typical punishments for typical crimes, the intricate web of associations among prisoners, sponsors, and the criminal justice system. Thanks to the records kept by the captain of the Lady Julian, Rees is able to re-create conditions on board, which were far from pleasant, of course—the women were prostituted to sailors right and left—but nothing compared to those on other convict ships, which regularly landed in Australia with most of their human cargo near death. Once at Sydney Cove, Rees loses sight of all but a few women who either managed to marry well or were consigned to the “whore’s ghetto” on desolate Norfolk Island.
Historical writing of the first rank, graphic and of real presence.Pub Date: March 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6787-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
