A fascinating tale but, unfortunately, often in need of more graceful telling. (60 b&w illustrations, 8 pp. color...
Before the Industrial Revolution, the daily departure of the sun had effects on people far different from those we experience in our own brightly illuminated age. Why? A first-time author explains.
Here, Ekirch (History/Virginia Tech) argues—and persuasively demonstrates—that darkness in earlier eras fostered “a distinct culture with many of its own customs and rituals.” And he should know. He’s researched his subject thoroughly (the endnotes run to 109 pages), trying with moderate success to cram into categories all he’s discovered. Unquestionably, Ekirch gives us a vast number of arresting details: Earlier generations, for example, believed that noxious vapors came with night; they didn’t admire sunsets; hanging the hearts of pigs over the hearth kept demons out of the chimney; humans have better night vision than most other animals; Pepys’ wife (worried about his carnal dreams) would periodically inspect his penis during his sleep; and some early thinkers believed sleep was caused by fumes rising to the brain from the belly of the sleeper. But there are also a number of observations that seem too patent for the attention Ekirch gives them. He tells us that dark was more dangerous than light, that the night facilitated storytelling, that people drank a lot, that lovers and criminals used the cover of darkness, that some people had bad dreams, that bundling was fun, that chamber pots could smell bad. Nonetheless, he’s done a creditable job of cataloguing the activities of the night—from nightwatching (a profession, he quips, probably older than prostitution) to enjoying masquerades to dung-burning to praying. He shows, too, that informal youth gangs sometimes ruled the dark streets in A Clockwork Orange fashion, and he reveals that sleeping the entire night through was a rarity in an earlier age. Too many potential dangers (fire!), suspicious sounds, foul odors, strange bedfellows and inconsistent diets routinely ruined rest.
A fascinating tale but, unfortunately, often in need of more graceful telling. (60 b&w illustrations, 8 pp. color illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05089-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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