An unabashedly admiring tribute to men of fighting faith.
Passionately argued rehabilitation of Pius IX’s international regiment of Zouaves, by Catholic journalist Coulombe (Vicars of Christ: A History of the Popes, 2003, etc.).
In 1860, the Papal States were isolated and beleaguered by the growing movement for Italian unification, led from Sardinia by King Victor Emmanuel II’s prime minister, Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, and his frequent tool and occasional opponent, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Resolving to resist being ousted (again) from Rome, Pope Pius IX sent out a call across the Catholic world for volunteers to become “Swords around the Cross.” The reaction was swift. General Lamoricière, a devout Catholic who had gained glory for France in the conquest of Algeria 30 years before, organized and commanded the Zouaves, named after one of North Africa’s fierce-fighting Berber tribes. The papal forces comprised members of the French and Roman nobility, Belgian, Irish, Swiss and even American volunteers. (Some “irreconcilable Confederates” arrived after the Civil War, finding comfort in another gallant lost cause.) Vastly outnumbered by the Sardinians, many of whom were seasoned veterans of the recent Crimean and Franco-Austrian wars, the spirited Papal Zouaves nonetheless gave valiant resistance over the next ten years, at Castelfidardo in 1860 and against Garibaldi’s onslaught on Rome in 1867. Coulombe does an expedient job of wading through the military details necessary to fully depict this tangled resolution of the “Roman question.” He portrays the crusading Zouaves as indomitable spirits, noting that they went on to fight in France and Spain, even to evangelize in the interior of Africa. Their kind of militancy has fallen into disfavor in recent years, but Coulombe does his best to revive the brand for a new generation.
An unabashedly admiring tribute to men of fighting faith.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60058-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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