A lively, erudite study.
British author and academic Gatrell (British history/Univ. of Essex; The Hanging Tree, 1994) explores exhaustively, albeit most pleasantly, the golden age of graphic satire that flourished in licentious London from 1770 to 1830.
London under George III and George IV was an economically and politically dynamic city, fast-growing, foggy and sinister, where the upper classes enjoyed enormous excesses and the lower classes writhed abjectly, with a chasm between. A new hunger for more graphic, explicit imagery was the result of an expansion of print culture and the attendant growth in demand from sophisticates as well as lower professionals and craftsmen. The older, classical tradition epitomized by the work of William Hogarth gave way to “commercial products [rooted] in the realities their purchasers recognized”—namely, politically roiling, scatological and sexually scandalous prints by artists like James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. The dreamscapes of William Blake and Henri Fuseli also merit attention here. The miseries of the city, the goings-on inside private clubs and the Prince of Wales's profligate behavior (and marital battles) were the favorite subjects of the era, all treated in densely informative chapters. Gatrell's reading is vast and scholarly; he moves from the diverse personalities of London neighborhoods to evolving expectations of manliness and femininity; from the nature of laughter to the different kinds of humor expressed in prints (i.e., satire, caricature, literary grotesque). He highlights some of the innovators, like Thomas Tegg, who transformed the print trade “by cutting costs and prices,” and ends with the era's “silencing” by the rise of the Cant and the middle class. The pages are lavishly illustrated by prints from the period.
A lively, erudite study.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8027-1602-4
Page Count: 700
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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