A wise, well-informed historical study.
A globe-trotting history of medieval travelers.
In this appealing survey, Bale, a London-based professor of medieval studies and author of Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life, has turned up a surprising number of travel guides and personal accounts beginning around 1000. At the time, travelogues mixed truth with fabrications, eyewitness testimony with antique fantasies; some were written in libraries by monks who had nothing better to do. Most of them acknowledged the grim reality of the times: “Written travel guides bear more than a passing resemblance to survival manuals; places were described in terms of how best to be endured rather than enjoyed.” During the Middle Ages, traders and adventurers traveled for pleasure, but the dominant form of medieval travel was the pilgrimage. Executed properly, it was no holiday, but rather an act of self-punishment and self-reform. Inevitably, with masses of the devout on the road, there appeared the trappings of mass tourism, with paid agents and suppliers, inns, ferries, and money-changing stations. Absent modern standards of sanitation, law enforcement, and medicine, these circumstances produced experiences that no modern reader would tolerate, but they make for an entertaining text. After setting the scene, Bale delivers a steady stream of extracts from his sources. The majority describe Europeans crossing the continent to the Holy Land, which despite intense suffering from their travels they greeted ecstatically; their enthusiasm did not diminish even after observing unimpressive holy sites, which seemed mostly to consist of dilapidated churches and saints’ body parts. The author provides accounts by Europeans who traveled still farther and by pilgrims from the Muslim world and Far East, who recorded their impressions and experience of the West with both wonder and misunderstanding. While readers may want to skim innumerable descriptions of churchly architecture, mostly they will marvel at what traveling humans endured hundreds of years ago.
A wise, well-informed historical study.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781324064572
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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