A witty and intelligent spin on the spiritual-journey motif.
Beset by the crises of middle age, an author and his photographer wife walk from Paris to the Pyrenees along the Way of Saint James.
Just before he turned 50, food and travel writer Downie (Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light, 2011, etc.) discovered that his gluttonous ways had finally caught up to him. Doctors told him that he had become “in essence, a walking foie gras” and was in imminent danger of liver failure. Disillusioned as well by “the forced cleverness of corporate magazine writing,” Downie decided to take time off to recover his health and rejuvenate his world-wearied spirit. A few days before Easter, he and his wife set off down the Rue Saint-Jacques, which marked the start of the route medieval pilgrims took from Paris to the shrine of St. James in Spain. Downie’s desire to trek across France had little to do with any need to find God. “I hadn’t escaped the gurus and drug culture of California to wind up Catholic in France,” he writes. His journey—most of which would take him along old Roman roads and pilgrim routes that wound through the Burgundy countryside—was one he hoped would re-inspire him to ask the “big questions” that had once fired his imagination. Along the “maverick way” the couple followed (and which he documents with photographs), Downie was drawn to the way Celtic and Roman history intermingled in the landscape, architecture and people. He came to understand that however modern France appeared to be, it lived “simultaneously in the past and present.” More profoundly, he realized that he was ultimately no different from the pilgrims who had walked “The Way” before him. His pilgrimage, like theirs, was “both the question and the answer” and a means to heightened awareness.
A witty and intelligent spin on the spiritual-journey motif.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-432-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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