Well-researched and gracefully written, but ultimately both tenuous and tentative.
Michigan law professor Miller (The Anatomy of Disgust, 1997, etc.) continues his Sue Grafton–like progress through the catalogue of human attributes.
Acknowledging that “courage is no easy virtue to get a grip on,” Miller nonetheless charges fearlessly ahead in this entertaining, troubling, and fluid meditation on what he calls “the most frequent theme of all world literature.” Miller focuses principally on the military variety, for “no theory of courage can ignore war or the experience of fighting, without being hollow at its core.” Miller analyzes the memoirs of soldiers, the musings of martial philosophers, and even war poems and novels to illuminate his themes. We hear a variety of opinions, from philosophers Plato, Socrates (Miller describes his little-known military exploits), and Aristotle; from Icelandic sagas (which, Miller claims, contain only 128 similes throughout); from such Civil War authors and soldiers as Abner Small and U.S. Grant; and from Vietnam veterans Tim O’Brien and Philip Caputo. Mike Tyson, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Edith Wharton are among the many who make cameos. Throughout, the author continually admits that his subject is daunting in its complexity; sometimes he states this explicitly, but more often he reveals it stylistically in his tendency to ask questions rather than make statements (e.g., “Could it be that the human capacity for courage is ineffably tied to the limits of our bodily powers?”). Miller defends less secure ground (as he admits himself) when he writes about the courage of women and about moral (rather than physical) courage: he concludes his comments about women in the military by declaring that they “will have made it” when they can be court-martialed “for cowardly conduct,” and he avers (a bit patronizingly) that moral courage is only “nearly as sublime” as “physical bravery.”
Well-researched and gracefully written, but ultimately both tenuous and tentative.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-674-00307-1
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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