Unfortunately, none of the suspects—each of whom change their stories numerous times—are compelling enough to sustain our...
Crime among the rich and famous has always fascinated—witness the mass addiction to the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994. This intriguing saga proves that the Italians of the early 1900s were no different.
The “Murri Murder Affair” captivated Italy and much of Europe for nearly three years, from the night of Aug. 28, 1902, when 33-year-old Count Francesco Bonmartini was brutally stabbed to death in his Bologna apartment, until Aug. 11, 1905, when the jury returned verdicts on the five defendants charged with the crime. Those included Bonmartini's wife, Linda, accused of fomenting the fatal conspiracy, and her brother Tullio, charged with fatally stabbing Bonmartini. Other defendants were Carlo Secchi, a physician and Linda's lover; Rosa Bonetti, Linda's wardrobe maid and Tullio's lover; and Pio Naldi, a lowlife gambler allegedly recruited by Tullio in the murder plot. None of the principals are particularly sympathetic, save for the portly, gullible Bonmartini, who leaves his profitable villa in Padua for an unattractive, self-centered wife who abandons his bed within a few years. His new in-laws are just as cold. For no apparent reason other than his perceived social awkwardness, Bonmartini soon finds himself completely isolated—trapped in a sexless marriage to his high-strung, hypochondriac wife and despised by her family, particularly Linda's celebrated physician father Augusto Murri and her radical socialist brother Tullio. By the night of his murder, Bonmartini had picked out his coffin and begun carrying a revolver. The buildup to the killing is interesting enough, but the story slows perceptively once we enter Italy's Byzantine legal system. There, trials are wont to resemble The Jerry Springer Show, with witnesses often allowed to debate each other, the judge and their prosecutors. This six-month proceeding was heavy on histrionics, as Vella (Intimate Enemies, 1997) paints a courtroom overflowing with sobbing, screaming, fainting and other operatic touches.
Unfortunately, none of the suspects—each of whom change their stories numerous times—are compelling enough to sustain our interest through all the legal wrangling, and Vella's curious tale is eventually undone by her over-attention to detail.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5046-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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 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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