A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.
A surprisingly engaging study of an eccentric late-Victorian illustrator whose work “transformed [cats] from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names [and] personalities…of their own.”
Upon his death in a British mental hospital, Louis Wain (1860-1939) was a household name, but he is largely forgotten today. Known for his distinctive style of drawing cats mimicking the mannerisms, poses, and aspirations of Victorian society, many of his feline characters wearing the era’s latest fashion styles, Wain managed to eke out a respectable living for decades as a freelance illustrator for periodicals and postcard designers. Born with a cleft lip and largely home-schooled and retiring by nature, he had to support five younger sisters and an unstable mother nearly to the end of his life. His proclivity for cat characters emerged at a time when people in Britain began to shift their focus from dogs to cats. Hughes, a literary critic for the Guardian and author of Victorians Undone, is marvelously knowledgeable about the era’s famous cat people, including Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, and T.S. Eliot, and about the period’s massive societal changes. “It is no coincidence,” writes Hughes, “that the modern cat emerged during what historians call ‘the second industrial revolution,’ that period between 1870-1920 which was marked by electrification, machine production, geographic mobility, mass culture, and the fracturing of class relations.” In 1907, Wain traveled to New York to work on a syndicated cat cartoon; he was able to reinvent himself at the end of World War I with dazzling avant-garde cat designs before his hospitalization, probably for schizophrenia, in 1924. This consistently fascinating book includes a generous selection of Wain’s illustrations, which became increasingly bizarre during his later years.
A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781421448145
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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 Yorkerstaff 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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
