by Barbara Frale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2009
A good resource for scholars, but not particularly satisfying as a revelation of “secret history.”
Vatican historian Frale supplies plenty of facts about the controversial Crusaders.
In these post–Da Vinci Code days, the very mention of the Templars is enough to spark readers’ curiosity, yet the true history of this shadowy order of warrior-monks has more often than not been misrepresented in film and fiction. The author debunks common delusions about the origins, organization, rise to prominence and ultimate demise of the Knights Templar, using troves of documents she unearthed from the Vatican Secret Archives. The military order was originally intended to protect the interests of the king of Jerusalem during the Christian occupation of the Holy Land between the 12th and 14th centuries. The ideal Templar was a knight whose religious devotion and piety were strong enough that he would take vows of poverty and chastity, offering his body in sacrifice to defend Christians against Saracen threats. The Templars enjoyed an unprecedented degree of independent governance. They were not required to answer to any church authority except the pope, nor was their strictly regulated income subject to taxation by secular rulers. Since no other monastic order in the Catholic tradition had ever born arms against actual rather than spiritual enemies, the foundation of the group required some creative theological solutions. Once the Christian territories in the Middle East had been lost and the Crusades no longer inspired the masses to war, the Templars continued to serve as bankers to Europe’s potentates, a role that, coupled with their shocking initiation practices, would prove the order’s undoing. Perhaps by design, the subject’s enormous popular appeal is not reflected in Frale’s prose; her straightforward history privileges names and dates over an entertaining narrative. Detailed chronicles of each Crusade and the political workings of successive popes overshadow the story of the Templars themselves.
A good resource for scholars, but not particularly satisfying as a revelation of “secret history.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55970-889-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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