A well-written summary, though nothing revolutionary.
Yet another visit to those sanguinary years when heads rolled, blood flowed and people cheered.
In his first book, BBC Radio writer Fife eschews most of the traditional conventions of scholarship and simply retells the sad, horrifying story. Readers interested in the sources of his many quotations, some as long as two pages, will look in vain for foot- or endnotes. Still, the author writes with skill, confidence and considerable wit, displaying a shrewd instinct for the important detail, the ironic twist and the poignant moment. Fife begins on July 11, 1793, with the assassination of Marat, stabbed in his bath by the distraught Marie-Charlotte de Corday. The author then returns to the Revolution’s early, hopeful days, examining its proximate causes (the horrible harvest of 1788 among them), its signal events (the storming of the Bastille, the beheadings of the king and queen) and the rise of a new generation of anti-royalist leaders. Fife spends some time assessing the situation in the Vendée, a region that wished to adhere to its king and its religion and paid for this folly by suffering unspeakable brutalities. The author frequently pauses to tell small, mostly appalling stories about minor characters who found themselves dragged to the guillotine for reasons ranging from clerical error to an intemperate remark in a dress shop. The tale’s dark hero, of course, is Robespierre, who first appears in the book’s opening pages and is rarely offstage thereafter. The narrative ends with his grisly demise: a botched suicide that left his face a ruin, followed by 17 hours of agony that ended only at the guillotine, the “national razor” whose operations the prissy, self-righteous lawyer and architect of terror had not previously witnessed. Fife properly notes an awful irony: The Terror’s leaders claimed to love “the people,” but did not much care for actual breathing ones.
A well-written summary, though nothing revolutionary.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-35224-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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