Histories of ideas are rarely page-turners, but Werth has done the trick.
A rich, entertaining slab of Victorian American history, focused on the debate over evolution.
Adopting a format similar to Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club (2001), historian Werth (The Scarlet Professor, 2001, etc.) follows a dozen figures who made “survival of the fittest” the guiding principle of the Gilded Age. He stresses that Charles Darwin shared the American media spotlight with fellow Englishman Herbert Spencer, who actually coined the famous phrase and felt Darwin received too much credit. More philosopher than naturalist, Spencer wrote on human evolution, interpreting Darwinian natural selection in ways scientists now consider spurious. In Darwin’s view, fitness described an organism’s ability to adapt; the fittest were not the strongest, but those who produced the most offspring. In Spencer’s more pugnacious version, humans battled it out. The strong overpowered the weak, grew prosperous and became civilized, thus evolving into a more advanced species. In the turbulent years following the Civil War, this idea galvanized enthusiastic American “social Darwinists.” They believed Spencer’s version of evolution proved that America’s entrepreneurial spirit, wealth and laissez-faire government marked its citizens as a superior race. Not everyone agreed, and Werth gives an engrossing account of the lives and quarrels of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Huxley, Louis Agassiz, Carl Schurz, Henry Ward Beecher, Victoria Woodhull and a half-dozen undeservedly lesser-known figures. Many digressions into their private lives, such as the media circus surrounding minister Beecher’s adultery, seem distantly related to the evolution controversy, but few readers will skip them. The finale recounts the 1882 dinner at Delmonico’s, where a Who’s Who of leading men assembled to honor Spencer. Their adulatory speeches brilliantly summarize the book’s theme, although Spencer bit the hands that fed him by lecturing the Americans on being excessively preoccupied with business and preaching the need for a “gospel of relaxation.”
Histories of ideas are rarely page-turners, but Werth has done the trick.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6778-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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