A diverting if slightly underdone effort.
Originally published in Britain in 1996, this trek in the footsteps of a medieval Englishman created the template for Milton’s later studies of historic journeys (Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, 1999; Big Chief Elizabeth, 2000).
Milton has invented a unique form of travel-writing, investigating the world as it existed in the yearnings and imagination of long-ago Europeans. Here, he sets out in search of Sir John Mandeville, a native of St. Albans who claimed to have traveled through the Holy Land to China, and whose Travels became one of the best-known books of the 14th century. Despite his influence on explorers from Columbus to Drake, Mandeville was all but written off by the Victorians. His vivid descriptions of the monstrosities of the East didn’t jibe with 19th-century sensibilities, and the general conclusion was that the old man probably never left England at all. Milton attempts to rescue his protagonist from obscurity by visiting the places Mandeville claimed to have visited, hoping to find indications of veracity. He does this with considerable charm and some degree of success, gleaning tidbits about 14th-century Constantinople, Cyprus, Syria, and Jerusalem during his stays that seem to confirm Mandeville’s account. He does not, however, attempt to trace Mandeville’s alleged path into China and Indonesia; instead, he concludes, correctly but half-heartedly, that Mandeville never made it any farther East, and that the second half of Travels, with its accounts of giant snails and people with two heads, was part of a complicated allegory about the decline of Christendom that stands in purposeful contrast to the first. Milton does some impressive sleuthing along the way, tracking down all the Mandevilles in England to find his man, but his historical analysis can be questionable (e.g., his discussion of the Nestorians). The story never quite rises to the level of the author’s ingenuity and wit, as it would in Milton’s subsequent books.
A diverting if slightly underdone effort.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-24997-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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