Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism.
A keen, dense examination of crimes of passion in the decades before World War I.
Novelist Appignanesi (Sacred Ends, 2013, etc.), who chairs the Freud Museum, explores three narratives of violence, arguing that the subsequent scandalous trials reveal changing perspectives on women in terms of psychology, spirituality, and class. She notes how the era’s perceptions of feminine virtue made transformative legal dramas inevitable: “If a woman was being tried for murder and there was no insanity plea,” she writes, “then she could only be either innocent or a monster of depravity.” The first obscure tales from Victorian-era England and Paris foreshadow the modern phenomena of tampering and stalking. In Brighton, Christiana Edmunds was charged with a boy’s murder following a public panic over poisoned chocolates, which she’d distributed in a plot to win back a married lover, and was ultimately committed rather than executed: “This moral insanity was understood as a disease…and it predisposed the patient to commit criminal acts.” A few years later, singer Marie Bière shot her caddish ex-boyfriend in public following the death of the daughter he’d rejected. Although he survived to testify against her, her attorneys’ narrative of hysteria provoked by cruelty resulted in acquittal. Appignanesi views this in terms of French Republican virtue: “It now seem[ed] more permissible for women to act, and to act violently if need be, to protect or avenge their honor.” The author focuses on the seamier aspects of the better-recalled Stanford White–Evelyn Nesbit scandal, emblematic of Gilded Age New York, noting that the teenage Nesbit had married White's eventual murderer, brutish millionaire Harry Thaw, after he'd raped and assaulted her: “Evelyn continued to be pulled apart by the two men, each fearing that the other might trump him in her favours and in revelations about illicit acts.” Appignanesi patiently constructs a mosaic of law, psychology, and class strictures, producing more of a sweeping academic meditation than a true-crime narrative.
Will satisfy readers attuned to the juncture of history, psychology, and feminism.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-814-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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