Using imaginary conversations, NYU professor Cantor (Inventing the Middle Ages, 1991, etc.) attempts to make medieval culture and society relevant for the modern reader. Beginning in the fifth century with Helen, mother of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, Cantor guides us through the Middle Ages up to John, Duke of Bedford, in charge of the English army in France in 1427. En route we meet St. Augustine in North Africa, Alcuin as an old man at Aachen musing on his hopes for a Christian Empire under Charlemagne, Humbert of Lorraine and his dreams of a new order through papal power, St. Hildegard with her vision of femininity's role, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine caught up in dynastic conflicts, and the scholarly ideals of the gentle Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and first chancellor of Oxford University. Each chapter consists of a conversation bringing out the character of one of these figures. Cantor evokes the ambiances of each of the various epochs, and he enables us to enter sympathetically into the intense idealism of the people concerned even as we become aware of their limitations—as in the conversation among Augustine, his outspoken sister, and an old friend who has become a schismatic bishop. Cantor's dialogue is best when he is playing one idea off another, but he can be wooden when his characters inform each other of ``recent'' events. A serious problem, too, is his unabashed anachronism throughout. Thus we hear Helen discussing women's liberation, anti-Semitism, and religion in terms clearly familiar to the 1990's. This makes for stimulating reading, but since it is also supposed to be history, readers cannot feel sure whether or not they are being manipulated. On balance, a vivid exercise in narrative that is more ideological than historical.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016989-3
Page Count: 206
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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