Not always easy reading but a book from which more than just Irish citizens can learn.
Irish history from the Irish point of view.
That view comes from acclaimed historian Coogan (The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, 2012, etc.), a true take-no-prisoners writer. The story of Ireland is that of a country struggling against colonialism and the church. The men who fought on Easter 1916 knew they would die; it was their courage that allowed them to hold out for a week. The executions, William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sixteen Dead Men,” and the letter of outrage from Limerick’s bishop roused the country to true revolution. Then came the ugly times of the Black and Tans and Michael Collins’ pioneering urban guerrilla warfare. In 1932, Éamon de Valera, Collins’ true opposite, took charge of the government. It was the zenith of his power, and it continued through World War II, but new voices needed to be heard. The 1950s and ’60s brought a drive for economic expansion with hope of membership in the European Economic Community. The visit of American president John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the changes of the Second Vatican Council also had marked influences on the country. Tourism increased, and there was even a proposal to fund medical aid for women and children, which was powerfully opposed by the church. Here, Coogan throws off the gloves as he lays into the Catholic Church, which ran the schools, institutions, and hospitals—including industrial schools, reformatories, and the Magdalene laundries run by “fallen” girls. The abuses in those institutions are still coming out, and while some restitution has been made, it has been made by the state of Ireland rather than the convents and the diocese. The Celtic Tiger rise of the 1990s and 2000s and the economic collapse lead Coogan to his final plea for “ethical political oversight and…correct governance…that attends to more than short-term financial gain and personal enrichment.” The author also bemoans the departure from the 1916 promises of child care, women’s rights, and social health.
Not always easy reading but a book from which more than just Irish citizens can learn.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-11059-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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 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
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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