Conveys with ghastly power the relentlessness of Cortés, the tragedy of Montezuma, the brutality of battle and the utter...
Lively account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
Levy (Writing and Literature/Washington State Univ.; American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett, 2005, etc.) portrays the momentous clash of two cultures through the characters of their respective leaders. Hernán Cortés, in his early 30s, was restless, haughty, deeply Catholic, trained in law and relatively untried when he arrived in 1519 at Cozumel, Yucatán, under the aegis of the governor of Cuba. Montezuma, five years his senior, had been the semi-divine ruler of the glorious Aztec confederation of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco and Tacuba for two decades, living in strict accordance with a host of gods who orchestrated human destiny and required appeasement in the form of human sacrifice. As the Spaniards moved inland, Cortés used fancy cavalry demonstrations and pyrotechnics to stun his opponents and seize the upper hand, despite the fact that his 500-man force was vastly outnumbered. Gifts from Montezuma failed to stop the invaders’ advance to the wondrous water-encircled city of Tenochtitlán, where Cortés achieved a bloodless coup d’état and essentially imprisoned the humiliated Montezuma. Levy carefully picks his way through the subsequent Aztec insurgency, Montezuma’s death and the terrible retreat from Tenochtitlán, during which Cortés’s gold-laden army was nearly exterminated in an encounter known as La Noche Triste. Threatened and aided in turn by rival Spanish incursions, Cortés would make a spectacular, calculated comeback in the construction of a small navy capable of amphibious assault on the Aztecs’ 200-year-old city.
Conveys with ghastly power the relentlessness of Cortés, the tragedy of Montezuma, the brutality of battle and the utter bewilderment of one culture in the face of the other.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80538-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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