An impressive synthesis of historical detail and novelistic atmosphere. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)
Bestselling French novelist Franck (Separation, 1994, etc.) turns to nonfiction with a thorough and vivid evocation of the City of Light in its heyday as capital of the avant-garde.
According to Franck, at certain points in time a city becomes a harbor for the disaffected of both artistic and lunatic stripes (which were often indistinguishable), and under such a regime of cultural, religious, and political tolerance, a handful of artists, thinkers, and writers, free to express themselves in fresh ways, give birth to entirely new movements in the arts. Paris at the beginning of the 20th century set just such a stage for the confluence of events and people that led to many of the cornerstone “isms” of modern art: cubism, dadaism, fauvism, futurism, and surrealism. While the author concentrates his survey on the artists of the period, particularly Picasso, Modigliani, and Matisse, he also looks at the contributions of writers, poets, sculptors, composers, and photographers who participated in this cultural cross-pollination. Covering the period from roughly 1900 to 1930, Franck introduces the reader to an international cast of characters, including Polish-Italian poet Apollinaire, French painter and cubism co-founder Braque, Russian choreographer Diaghilev, and the American writers Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, who arrived near the end of the run. Franck presents these players in the settings of their daily lives, pungently evoking crushing poverty, extravagant partying, fierce loving, and contentious wrangling that epitomize the bohemian lifestyle. Conceived as a companion piece to his untranslated novel Nu couché, Franck’s chronicle does much to demystify the temperament of these “sublime troublemakers” who, when not “inventing the century’s language,” took childish delight in thumbing their noses at a bourgeoisie that held them in equal contempt. The trove of anecdotes fleshes out the stereotypes and makes sense of the conflicting viewpoints that sparked this prodigiously creative period.
An impressive synthesis of historical detail and novelistic atmosphere. (16 pages b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1697-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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