Definitive and encyclopedic.
An iconic people receive a scholar’s attention.
Stewart, a scholar at the University of Edinburgh, reminds readers that ancient writers (Caesar, Tacitus) recorded Celts as fearless warriors who rampaged across Europe and even sacked Rome. Vanishing from the record for a thousand years, they were rediscovered by Renaissance humanists. Although nowadays associated with Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, the original Celts cast a broader shadow. Never happy with their German ancestry, French academics worked to promote a Gaulish alternative, and British opposition to Anglo-Saxons flourished. The Renaissance was the period when modern European nations took shape, and these humanists, patriots and Christians all, disliked the Roman conviction that all people north of Italy were barbarians. Poring over fragmentary ancient manuscripts but speculating generously, many concluded that their nations’ founders were civilized migrants from ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, or Troy; their religious leaders (druids) were precursors of Christianity, and their language a direct descendant of Europe’s mother tongue—Hebrew. Much of this was nonsense, or deliberately faked, but Stewart is a dedicated scholar, not a popular historian, so he leaves no stone unturned, and readers will encounter a steady stream of unfamiliar savants, obscure texts, and raging controversies often wacky to modern ears but now forgotten. Persistent readers may perk up as he reaches the 19th century, when history became scientific, although that included the abortive sciences of racism and phrenology, which mostly reinforced English dislike of the Irish. French, English, and German Celtic claims receded, and Stewart’s focus narrows to familiar Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, plus a touch of Brittany. Over the last century, Ireland’s independence and the elimination of scholarly nonsense have made Celtic studies a respectable academic field. Popular Celticism persists, mostly in Wales and Scotland, as a minority movement more successful in culture than politics.
Definitive and encyclopedic.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780691222516
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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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