A top-notch addition to the library of any cultured equestrian; highly readable from start to finish.
A fascinating canter through the history of horses and their dealings, for better or worse, with humans.
Horses have served humans for centuries. Still, writes Raulff, director of the German Literature Archive, we have arrived at the end of the “Age of Equus.” “To be born in the countryside in the mid-twentieth century meant growing up in an old world,” he writes at the outset of his sweeping cultural history, one in which horses did work drawing plows and wagons; even at that time, the horse was at the end of its useful life, the victim of a long decline in the age of mechanization that corresponded to the “long 19th century.” The “Centaurian Pact” that Raulff celebrates still exists, though horses are now mostly used for recreation, but under very different terms from those of the past. In his long, circumstantial discussion of horses in warfare, for instance, he observes that in World War I, between 8 million and 9 million horses were killed, about as many as humans. The book has an almanaclike feel to it, darting from sketch to interesting tidbit to extended narrative. Though it sometimes approaches an everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about manual, in all its oddments—e.g., Theodore Roosevelt risked a lawsuit from Buffalo Bill Cody for coining the term “Rough Riders,” the invention of the stirrup stirred demand for heavier armor and bigger horses, spurring evolution of armaments and animals alike, and so forth—there is a thoroughly impressive literary endeavor at play. Indeed, some of the best moments of this excellent book concern literary and artistic responses to horses, from the “savagely beaten or tormented horse” as a literary trope (Nietzsche, Kraus, Schopenhauer) to Slim Pickens’ riding “the hobby horse of the nuclear age” at the close of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.
A top-notch addition to the library of any cultured equestrian; highly readable from start to finish.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-432-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
PROFILES
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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