Not as groundbreaking as the author imagines, but a solid retelling of an always-interesting tale of the first great...
A mildly revisionist history that gives principal credit for the modernization of Paris to the monarch rather than the prefect.
Napoléon III was “the man who inspired and initiated [the] transformation of Paris,” writes architect/historian Kirkland. By the time Georges-Eugène Haussmann became prefect of the Seine (responsible for the city’s administration) in 1853, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had already drafted his plans for transforming Paris from a medieval cluster of narrow, filthy streets into a modern metropolis with broad boulevards and proper sanitary facilities. He had also recently conducted a coup d’état that transformed him from president to emperor; his plans did not include democracy. Haussmann had similarly autocratic instincts. He juggled accounts, avoiding pesky financial oversight from elected officials, and demolished historic neighborhoods. Haussmann’s highhanded ways led to his dismissal in 1870, but by then his main projects were completed: a municipal sewer system, major avenues such as the Rue de Rivoli, parks like the Bois de Boulogne and the great central market at Les Halles. The huge sums of money necessary for these grands travaux required new methods of financing, and new capitalists like the Pereire brothers were happy to oblige. The railroad developers’ bank, Crédit Mobilier, funded most of the grands travaux, but its collapse in 1867 revealed the brazen corruption that was as much a part of the Second Empire as its ambitions. Kirkland evenhandedly assesses the projects’ benefits and costs, concluding that most “could have been achieved in a more sensitive way, without such blind sacrifice of the city’s historic character to the object of modernization.” On the whole, however, he is admiring of the urban amenities built during this period, which still function to make Paris one of the world’s most agreeable cities.
Not as groundbreaking as the author imagines, but a solid retelling of an always-interesting tale of the first great urban-planning achievement.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-62689-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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