A brief travelogue that bridges and comingles past and present.
French travel writer Tesson chronicles his journey following the route of Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Moscow to Paris—200 years later, on motorcycle, in winter.
The two weeks documented here represent an adventure, pilgrimage, and challenge against the elements and the weight of history. In 2012, the author and a small group of friends decided to brave the elements of ice and snow on two motorcycles with sidecars, duplicating the route that, two centuries earlier, had been littered with corpses from the well-documented retreat of Napoleon, a “paradox, unique in Human History: an army marched, from victory to victory, toward its total annihilation!” Over the course of the text, Tesson evokes War and Peace, various historical accounts, and Napoleon’s own grandiose confessions, alternating with the contemporary account of following Napoleon’s tragic route. But why? “For the sheer glory of it.” There was much camaraderie on the trip but little glory, as the journey culminated less in triumph than in relief; ultimately, the dangers encountered and the historical horrors conjured hardly seemed worth the risk. As the author notes at one point, “doubt was worming its way into me: what the hell was I doing on a Ural [motorcycle] in the middle of December, with two fools in tow, when these damn machines are made to transport small, 90-pound Ukrainian women from Yalta beach to Simferopol on a summer afternoon?” Yet the meditative aspects of braving the elements on motorcycle offered time to reflect on the enduring legacy of the Franco-Russian conflict on both nations and the rest of the world, the visions that drove Napoleon to his death, and the differences in character between the Russians—in the era after Communism and the Soviet Union—and the French. Both the writer and the reader feel like they’ve really been through something when the journey is done and Tesson concludes, “I suddenly felt like going home, taking a shower, and washing off all those horrors.”
A brief travelogue that bridges and comingles past and present.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-554-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Compass
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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