An exuberant, well-timed promotion for Rome in this its Jubilee Year.
A glowing tribute to the Eternal City, from an American who became infatuated with Rome some 20 years ago and later
moved there with his wife and two young sons. To call Epstein (the president of an association—also called As the Romans Do—that provides guided tours of Rome and Italy) enthusiastic about his adopted home is an understatement. He praises the city's love of culture and sense of history, celebrates the Romans' live-for-today attitude and flair for the dramatic, flips over the beauty of its exceptionally well-groomed and sexy women, and savors its food and wines. Not even the strikes, traffic jams, and summer heat for which Rome is equally famed can dampen his ardor. He is initially wary of the Catholic doctrine classes that his young sons must attend in the public schools, but his fears are soon allayed. Epstein frequently travels about the city on foot, relishing its architecture, plazas, vistas, fountains, ruins, narrow streets, and small shops. Food and drink figure large here: in lively prose sprinkled with deftly translated Italian words and phrases, he extolls the sensual pleasures of morning coffee, quick lunches, and multicourse dinners in the Italian style. Simply waiting in line for bread seems to be a pleasant adventure for Epstein. Yet it may be the people that he loves most, admiring not only the importance they give to beauty, but the sophistication of their attitudes about sex and money, the strength of their family ties, and especially the rhythm of their lives. A somewhat less rosy picture emerges at the very close, however, when Epstein introduces a character disillusioned with the city and acknowledges that Rome, now experiencing a "tidal wave of immigration," is on its way to becoming "just another big city." Perhaps Epstein's real message is: Come quick if you want to experience Rome while it lasts.
An exuberant, well-timed promotion for Rome in this its Jubilee Year.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17272-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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 Yorkerstaff 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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