by Dianne Hales ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
A pleasant if highly selective tour led by a genial guide.
The continuation of an author’s love affair with Italy.
“Italy chose me,” writes Hales (Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, 2014, etc.) at the beginning of her latest book about the country she loves. Thirty years ago, after she gave a talk in Gstaad, Switzerland, “I impetuously switched trains and headed south to a sun-kissed country I’d never visited.” It’s been love through rose-colored glasses ever since. This installment is not so much a travelogue as a survey course of the great achievements that have precipitated what Hales calls “una passione italiana,” a passion that can “take you beyond yourself and outlast you.” Although she mentions some of the places she has seen—e.g., a trip to “the last traditional textile maker in Venice,” a visit to Piedmont vineyards—most of the book consists of capsule histories of the warriors, literary figures, painters (including the Renaissance’s “two blinding supernovas,” da Vinci and Michelangelo), foods, wines, films, and more that have helped this “scrawny peninsula smaller than California…leave such an outsize imprint on Western culture.” The author’s tone can be breathless. When she alights at a train station, “I longed for more eyes to see, more ears to listen, more neurons to process the sensations bombarding me.” When she eats handmade chocolates, delectable flavors “cascade into my mouth. Every taste bud thrills to attention. Waves of delight ripple along my tongue.” Italy’s greatest achievements are indeed extraordinary, but one wonders what some readers will think of the contention that Italian food is “arguably everybody’s favorite” or the author’s unsubstantiated claim that Italian cucina “has dethroned haughty French cuisine.” Nonetheless, the narrative is an enjoyable read with memorable passages, as when Hales calls thrice-married Ovid “a prototypical advice columnist” whose “urbane manual for seduction, Ars amatoria,” offered advice on such topics as how ladies could enhance their flat breasts and fake their orgasms.
A pleasant if highly selective tour led by a genial guide.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49916-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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