An intensive journey inside Luther’s thinking as it was forming in opposition to the church.
An engaging study of a short but explosive period in the life of the great reformer and translator of the Bible.
Woodrow Wilson International Center senior scholar Reston (The Accidental Victim: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Real Target in Dallas, 2013, etc.) immerses himself in the life of Martin Luther (1483-1546) with a contagious energy, drawing readers into the complexities of this fraught period of religious conflict without getting lost in the research. Luther’s role as a “contrarian” gave impetus to the movement that would take his name, and his many revolutionary actions included abandoning his legal studies to become a monk (thereby alienating his father) and nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Imperial Church in Wittenberg in 1517. The act of publicly denouncing the sale of “indulgences,” among other venal policies of the Catholic Church, caused an immediate counteroffensive from the pope, who tried to lure him to Rome and excommunicated him. Nonetheless, Luther hardened his positions, questioning even the validity of Catholicism’s sacraments, the demand of celibacy from priests and the need for good works in attaining heavenly salvation rather than “by faith alone.” After a bruising interrogation by Charles V’s minions at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther was quietly removed from peril and sheltered by pro-reform sympathizer Elector Frederick the Wise at his Wartburg Castle, where Luther lived in disguise and wrote prodigiously. His correspondence to fellow scholars and advisers would help hone his ideas and inform his translations of the New Testament. While he was wrestling over these months with Satan, as he wrote, his radicalized rival Gabriel Zwilling and others took the rebellion to violent levels, prompting Luther to re-emerge and re-establish control of his flock with new clarity. In a swift-moving narrative, Reston examines all of the aspects of this tumultuous time for the reformer.
An intensive journey inside Luther’s thinking as it was forming in opposition to the church.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-06393-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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