An impressive immersion in the storied precincts of art connoisseurship.
A millennium of production, patronage, scholarship, and rediscovery of medieval manuscripts.
Manuscript devotees get the star treatment in this fascinating and multilayered art history, a natural follow-up to de Hamel’s award-winning previous book, Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts. The "club" includes 12 historical figures featured in short biographical chapters. The author begins with Saint Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. In the 15th century, Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the most successful bookseller in Europe," turned Renaissance Italy’s rediscovery of ancient classics into a business. Simon Bening, active in 16th-century Bruges, is one of the few manuscript illuminators whose name we know. Sir Robert Cotton, an early modern antiquary, owned hundreds of manuscripts, and his classification numbers are still used by the British Library. Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664-1736) acquired Hebrew manuscripts, and Jean-Joseph Rive authored "the most bad-tempered book on manuscripts ever written" in 1789. Other notable club members: Sir Frederic Madden, the first Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum; notorious forger Constantine Simonides; Theodor Mommsen, the only manuscript scholar to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and Belle da Costa Greene, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, "the finest library of illuminated manuscripts outside Europe." This tour through manuscript history is dense with facts and dates but never dry. De Hamel, manuscript consultant for Sotheby's since 1975, is a charming and knowledgeable guide, and his “visits” with his subjects—tours of their residences or libraries—brings their obsessions to vivid life. By the end, readers are likely to agree that "illuminated manuscripts are the most entrancing of artefacts, conveyors both of texts and of some of the most refined art ever painted,” as well as “windows into human aspirations, emotions and sense of beauty.” The text features four-color illustrations throughout.
An impressive immersion in the storied precincts of art connoisseurship.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780525559412
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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