Often enlightening, but approaches daffiness when the epilogue invites us to place the chess queen alongside the Amazon, the...
Some tenuous speculations about the co-emergence of powerful political women and the most puissant piece on the chessboard.
Feminist historian Yalom (A History of the Wife, 2001, etc.) first became intrigued by this subject in 1998, when she saw a 14th-century chess queen carved in the shape of a nursing Madonna. (Later, she discovers it’s only a “minuscule possibility” that the carving was a game piece.) How did the queen come to be the most powerful of all? Her question sent her to archives, libraries, and chess authorities all over the world. The result mingles a brief history of chess from its birth in fifth-century India to its 20th-century adult ubiquity with a quick study of gender relations through the ages and slim biographies of powerful women in Asia and Europe whose eminence may have been so profound as to effect the evolution of the chess queen from stay-at-home spouse to aggressive warrior. Yalom provides fine photographs of the oldest queens in captivity, showing how the piece has acquired both stature and individuality (few extant pieces from before 1200 have faces). The author also notes how various religious authorities have attempted—and generally failed—to control chess, especially in its early years when lost games sometimes resulted in lost lives as angry players segued smoothly from vicarious to actual combat. (Betting also annoyed religious leaders, who wanted any loose cash to flow their way.) Yalom makes an appealing case, especially in her association of the game with the courtly love tradition and the cult of the Virgin Mary. But in the end she is stuck with what remote history often leaves us: attractive correlations but no smoking causative guns.
Often enlightening, but approaches daffiness when the epilogue invites us to place the chess queen alongside the Amazon, the Earth Mother, and the Virgin Mary, or to consider Hilary Rodham Clinton as a chess-queen incarnate. (b&w photos throughout; 13 color plates not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-009064-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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