by Stephanie Coontz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2005
A rich, provocative and entertaining social history.
How the marriage institution has evolved, from primitive societies to the present.
Coontz (Family Studies/Evergreen State) turns from scrutiny of the family (The Way We Really Are, 1997, etc.) to examination of marriage itself. With a host of examples, she considers the long-established system of marriages as they were arranged for economic, social and political advantage. These involved the input of parents, in-laws, siblings, rival nobles, concubines and, after the Middle Ages, popes, bishops and church reformers as well. This system, Coontz finds, remained the norm until the 18th century, when the spread of the market economy and the beginning of the Enlightenment brought profound changes. By the end of that century, the model of a love-based, male-protector marriage was firmly in place, with men and women seen as occupying separate spheres of existence, each dependent on the other and each incomplete without marriage. While the early-20th century saw changes in sexual expressiveness and relations between the sexes, the love-based model persisted, culminating in “the golden age of marriage” in the 1950s. It was, Coontz says, a “unique moment in the history of marriage,” a time when breadwinner husband and stay-at-home mom were considered the norm, and marriage provided the context for the greater part of most people’s lives. While short-lived, the 1950s model has come to be regarded by many as “traditional marriage,” an ideal whose decline is mourned. Coontz, however, exposes that view as shortsighted. Using both story and statistic, she demonstrates that for most of human history marriage has been an alliance held together by outside forces, and that an array of societal transformations continue even now to shape the institution. Just as the long-lived economic/political model can’t be revived, she counsels, neither can the 1950s “traditional” model. In her concluding chapters, she examines the pluses and minuses of contemporary marriage and looks at the value of alternatives.
A rich, provocative and entertaining social history.Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03407-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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