Engaging essays informed by first-rate scholarship and leavened with deep affection.
A leading authority on Venice offers a series of lovely, closely related essays on significant visitors to the city during the 19th century.
Norwich (Shakespeare’s Kings, 2000, etc.) begins with what is almost an apology for writing more about Venice and ends with a promise to publish no more. Let’s hope he changes his mind, for the subject is wonderfully rich, the chronicler gifted and knowledgeable. An early chapter features a swift history of the fall of the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic at the hands of Napoleon, followed by the destruction and cultural robberies visited on the city by the French and, subsequently, the Austrians. Then come sketches of some of the most significant non-Venetians who lived in and/or visited the city, beginning with Napoleon (who came only once, in 1807) and ending with Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. “Baron Corvo,” whose naughty sexual escapades Norwich relates most amusingly. In between are old friends and new surprises. Among the former is Lord Byron, whom Norwich does not care for; among the latter is the fact that the author discusses Byron’s 1816 summer Godwin in Geneva with Shelley and Mary without mentioning Frankenstein and tells of the poet’s fatal adventure in Greece without mentioning Trelawny. Expected portraits hanging in this gallery of rogues and heroes include those of Ruskin, Wagner, Browning, Whistler, Sargent, and Henry James. Norwich recalls how James created The Aspern Papers, a novella he considers the finest of all fictions set in his beloved city; he also tells the story of James trying but failing to carry out the request of deceased friend Constance Fenimore Woolson to sink all her clothing in the lagoon. Less known to general readers, but nonetheless fascinating, are sketches of Rawdon Brown, Horatio Robert Forbes Brown, and Austen Henry Layard. Only a few overlong quotations occasionally impede the flow of the prose.
Engaging essays informed by first-rate scholarship and leavened with deep affection.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50904-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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