Marred on occasion by rhetorical excess—but also full of surprises that sometimes come very near revelation. (16 pp. b&w...
What a backwater place we might have become if those thrifty, ambitious, adaptable, brilliant and sly Scots hadn’t emigrated here.
In an entertaining mix of hyperbole and good old-fashioned chauvinism, Fry (economics correspondent for The Scotsman) looks at the histories of Scotland and the US and discovers both connections and conundrums. He begins with the obvious (Scotland is small and old, the US big and new), then moves into a series of chapters that outline the contributions to our history made by individual Scots and by Scottish traditions and philosophies. We learn that Jefferson had some Scottish blood—and that both Hamilton and Burr studied with a Scot (are we reaching too far yet?). The author notes the influences of David Hume and Adam Smith; charts the bloodlines of American presidents (LBJ and Nixon both had some genes from the old country); and reminds us that Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Kit Carson, and Jim Bowie had Scots in their family trees. (He doesn’t remind us that Bowie was in the slave trade with Jean Lafitte and was a shameless forger of Spanish land grants.) American writers with Scottish blood include Washington Irving, Cooper, and Hawthorne—oh, and Poe’s foster father, David Allan, was a Scot. Fry notes the strong influence on Scots on the history of Princeton University. There’s a chapter on the Scots in Canada; lists of Scots (and partial Scots) who invented things (James Watt); Scots who helped fashion our economy and industry (John Law, Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates); who dominate our media (Rupert Murdoch); who entertain us (Sean Connery, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe); and who flew into space (John Glenn, Alan Shepard). Even kilt-crazy Trent Lott joins the parade. Fry believes that Americans are occasionally daffy: we rally around “clownish” politicians and embrace multiculturalism, which, argues the author in several places, is both shallow and ludicrous.
Marred on occasion by rhetorical excess—but also full of surprises that sometimes come very near revelation. (16 pp. b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33876-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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